HealthRadar
Nokia's Mobile Disease tracking tool is the biggest and most innovative Health project I have worked on as a Designer and Pilot manager.
This health service is aimed to help Health workers and Doctors in rural parts of India. The architecture involves 3 major parts: Input and output empowered by Design and the aggregation and analytics supported by Technology. The biggest learning from this project was that Technology can only help to a certain extent, key challenge for Design in such context is to create simple to use Interfaces and help overcome language and technology literacy.
THE CHALLENGE
Communicable diseases are globally responsible for almost 15 million deaths per annum. A review titled Global burden of disease among the urban poor compares disease burden among the 20% of the global population living in countries with the lowest per capita incomes, with similar estimates for the 20% living in countries with the highest per capita incomes. The study reveals that majority of deaths and disabilities in the former group are due to communicable diseases.
India suffers from similar situation with huge population and overburdened public health infrastructure. Disease surveillance is mostly done using paper based forms which are generated at grassroots level and eventually sent to district and state levels. This process is tedious and more importantly slow.
MOBILE AS A TOOL
We envisioned Mobile as a tool to (a) Incase efficiency of reporting and (b) Using Geographic information associated with such reporting to better identify high risk areas in timely manner. Based on these two guiding factors a system was designed with the following architecture.
VALIDATION
There are many communicable diseases in India, however in order to validate the system a disease that would have a rapid spread over a geographic area would be a ideal candidate. Hence it was decided that part of the pilot, we should focus on Malaria since it is endemic to many regions in India, hence more opportunities to validate the system.
After extensive field research and consultation with Doctors, the system used the following three parameters (a) Number of confirmed cases of Plasmodium Falciferum (b) Number of confirmed cases of Plasmodium Vivax and (c) Suspected cases of high fever.
By keeping a comparing the rising pattern of Reported cases of Fever, with confirmed cases of Vivax, Doctors were able to determine the conversion pattern and hence the intensity of spread of disease. Number of confirmed cases of Falciferum were used as Red flags since the mortality rates are very high. This could help intensify ground level preventive interventions in the area.
Here are four approaches to simplify information available to doctors in rural settings. Although they were knowledgable about science, their tech literacy varied dramatically from one group to another.,
STAKEHOLDERS & EXTENSION
This system would be used by various Stakeholders in different capacities. The design intent was that same data when combined with various contexts would generate insights that would be useful to health professionals at different levels
This project was shared on many public platforms: On Microsoft official blog, NID Vision Plus conference.
Role: Lead Designer and Pilot manager
For: Nokia Research Center, India
Year: 2009-10
Category: Service Design, User Experience Design, Research methods
