People who live away from their parents have a hard time keeping an eye on their parents’ health status and providing care remotely. Similarly, seniors who live alone and without the support of their children or other family face many difficulties in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. To solve this problem, we designed Medilog - a health support app which allows family members to provide aid to their distant elderly relatives and stay updated with their health status.
This project won Vancouver UX Award - UX by Students in 2019
Mobile Application
(Course Project)
UI/UX Design
Nusrath Imtiaz
Estela Xu
Keefe Liew
Cassey Peng
Adobe XD
Protopie
As most members in our team are international students who live apart from their family, we investigated our own parents/grandparents, also friends in the same situation asked their concerns, needs and expectations in this problem scope.
As a result, we find out the primary concern for the young generation are parents’/grandparents’ health status; the most significant need and expectation from parents/grandparent side are to build more connections with their kids.
We are inspired by Apple Watch and Apple Health – how wearable devices and mobile app can be connected to make health data more valuable. Although Apple Watch is primarily used for fitness, we see the potential to use it to track senior health and provide health analysis based on the tracking data.
The whole app idea is based on having a remote connection between Apple Watch and Medilog mobile app. The caregiver can create a profile in Medilog for their care-receiver, and the care-receiver can input their profile ID to the Apple Watch so that the watch can pull all collected data to the app. The app will provide interpretations of the data to improve distant caregiver’s understanding of their care-receiver’s health status, meanwhile, encourage them to communicate with the care-receiver to find better means for improving their health.
We designed a list of pre- and post-interview question to ask their impressions regarding the app concept before testing and their experience of using it after they go through the tasks we asked them to test.
Overall, we realized the following problems need to solve to optimize the user experience:
The home screen provides all essential data in one glance. It includes data that reflect the care-receiver's health condition in real-time and also explains those data in detail with one tap. The caregiver is also able to check their care-receiver's location (if they have their care-receiver's consent) and their daily schedule.
The general public would not have the full ability to understand numbers; therefore, Medilog provides explanations of all numbers, also offers reports that show weekly/monthly health trends and the meaning behind.
The goal of Medilog does not only explain data to the user but also help the user to transmit their understanding to actions. After reading weekly/monthly reports, users can tap in suggestions to see expert recommendations based on the data Medilog collected. Care-givers then can make a call with their care-receivers to make recommendations that would help their care-receiver to have a healthier lifestyle.
After having a conversation with the care-receiver, the caregiver can use Medilog's schedule feature to create tasks and reminders for their care-receiver.
From the care-receiver's side, they can check and update their daily task via their smartwatch (Apple Watch) on their side. The app will push notification to the smartwatch, and the care-receiver can mark the task as 'Complete' if they have done the task.
Except auto-alert that set by the caregiver based on a recommended heart rate range, the care-receiver can also trigger the alarm by making a diagonal swipe on the watch. This emergency feature allows them to contact their caregiver or 911. When they trigger the emergency feature, their location will be automatically shared with the caregiver.
The accuracy of the data we track heavily relies on Apple Watch, which we cannot guarantee a 100% correctness right now. But this issue might cause further concern about the auto alert feature, including how can we minimise false alert and what time interval should we wait for the user to define whether the emergency is false or not.
We also consider having a voice control features or link Medilog with smart-home devices like Google Home for senior who has difficulties to interact with smartwatch or smartphone.
