Medi-Symp

Medication management and adherence can be a struggle for patients, particularly for individuals with chronic illness. The burden of logistics to manage their medication is on the shoulders of patients, and it’s not always easy – 50% of patients with chronic illnesses don’t take their medication properly, usually because they forget to. Compounding this is the infrequently asked, yet critical, inquiry from their physicians about the effectiveness of their medications, an issue tackled best by symptom tracking over time. Medi-Symp is a mobile app with watch integration, aiming to challenge these challenging barriers to patient health and wellness.

Personalization and customization of key

Through our initial design research early on, we discovered that any attempt at generalization or an impersonal approach to our design would be unsuccessful. Specifically, the pharmacist interviewed emphasized this by saying “Remember: every patient is different, and every aspect varies from person to person”. Our literature review further demonstrated this because it indicated that each individual has different reasons for taking (or not taking) their medications. Some patients may need alerts temporarily, such as for a short-term medication, while others require permanent alerts. A one-size-fits-all approach is not the best approach. Initially, we wanted to have a quick and simple questionnaire to be filled out when recording symptoms, but we were reminded that having the same couple of questions for everyone would lower the benefit for everyone by adding unnecessary symptom questions for people that never had those issues. We also realized that there will inevitably be symptoms or unique reactions that people desire to track but we will not know about because everybody’s medical situation is unique. For this reason we added a free entry textbox, allowing for additional notes to be entered and tracked.

Accessibility through external devices

From our design research, we discovered that we needed to make our design more accessible. Specifically, allowing the symptomology recording to be done in a more quick and simple way. This critique came up through our diary study when our participant explained the lack of accommodations for those who have high-accessibility needs. “If I could pre-write common occurrences that happen in severe attacks and then have one or two buttons to press instead of having to type or speak that would be helpful. […]Since if it's bad enough I will be unconscious. Or nonverbal. Or paralyzed. Presents some issues.” - Diary Study Participant. We realized accessibility is very important for a design like this as people who have the highest accessibility needs are more likely to need a design like this the most, and most consistently. From here, we knew we needed a way for the participant to be able to record symptoms with only a few taps. This is where the idea of smart-watch integration came out. Being able to report symptoms through a watch would be easier than pulling out a phone, and also the watch would theoretically be on your person at all times. The second part of this redesign was our “Easy Symptoms” page where groupings of symptoms can be preset for easy access through the watch later.

Two Selected Tasks:

• Task 1: Remembering to take daily medication
• Task 2: Journaling symptomology for medical evaluation

We built our initial lofi prototype based on our design and research. We also geared the prototype to be able to complete the two selected tasks. Once we had our lofi prototype, we set out to find participants to gather two heuristic evaluations as well as three usability tests. We gained very insightful feedback from our participants from these tests. Some of the issues in our prototype were with notifications, participants pointed out that it was difficult to distinguish medicine vs symptomatology reminders. Another issue was there was no help page to assist the user in navigating the app. There was also an issue of non functionality with the settings and emergency contact pages not having screens in the prototype. A general piece of feedback we got was participants like consistency and simplicity across screens in the app.

From one of our usability tests, the participant found it difficult to submit their symptoms through the phone application. The participant found the initial paper prototype design screen for submitting symptoms confusing, especially the “Load Symptom Group” button.

Taking into account this feedback, we simplified the screens for submitting symptoms by removing confusing buttons and not having too many tabs on one screen so that the user is not confused and to keep the screen easier to navigate. We made sure to separate the phone and watch app by distinguishing symptom groups (phone app) and easy symptoms (watch app).

The usability tests revealed that the emergency contact page was non-functioning and a relevant feature as 2 of the participants tried tapping on this icon. One participant was confused on the meaning of the emergency contact button and even asked during the test, “What does this phone icon do? Does it link to your phone contacts app?”.

Using the feedback, we made sure to add functionality to the emergency contact page so that we could increase accessibility of our product and clear up any confusion. We made sure to maintain simplicity of the app and make the screens of the setting and emergency contact pages clear and easy to navigate. We maintained consistency by making the emergency contact page similar to the list of medication alerts page.

From our usability tests, a participant pointed out that it was hard to know if medicine was taking for today. Our initial paper prototype indicated medicine as taken by the filled in box that corresponds to that medicine. Another issue that arose was that the reminders did not give any instructions or dosage quantity when the user received the notification. This was exposed in each of our usability tests as each participant pointed that out.