In the respiratory health domain, data is subjective. It becomes harder with children as the likelyhood of conveying the symptom inaccurately is higher. Building a sustainable solution is only possible if the product can enable self-management. This is where good design becomes very critical.

Curie built technology that helps patients assess their health with a bed-side monitoring device. The first thing we did was to empatihize with the patients. This was done by spending a huge amount of time in the OPDs. We observed patients, their mental state, actions, body language amongst other things to figure out what patients and physicians go through. The unbaised observation allows us to understand the ground reality clearly. There’s immense learning that we get while observing a simple consultation in a physicians day. This learning was critical to framing the accurate problem statement for Curie.

While building an app is one task, understanding what needs to be built is another. In this case, Showing the right amount of information a patient needs to know is about finding the balance between the information shown through the app and the information communicated by the physician. Physicans however, always want to understand the underlying WHY.

The concept of remote patient monitoring needs to be less intrusive. This is because any new behaviors learnt live only as long as the condiditon is severe. Any reliance on continuing that behavious afterwards does not happen. So In a nutshell, the solution needs to be able to monitor patients proactively without the patient having to do anything out of their ordinary behaviours.

We addressed this by capturing the audio of respiratory condition, breaking the entire process into multiple steps and letting experts check-in to ensure data accuracy. We identified 5 stakeholders that needed to have their own experience to interact with the core data.

Concepts like wake-word detection, automated time-triggers, helped the technology be non-intrusive yet sensitive. During this time we made at-least 100 explorations before arriving at the final app.

The biggest fear of buinding a product and iterating it over months of various kinds of users is that certain biasis tnd to creep in. Once this happens, irrational becomes rational and this leads to outcoms being less sensitive to the users. Our team hence consciously kept challengining themselves by conducting regular user-testing. Every design delimma was handled by a quick Gorilla testing.

Upon analyzing the user behavior and feedback, we were able to see traits of compliance in-patients and physicians. We observed that the only way user would see value in a product belonging to the healthcare domain is if it is consistent and predicts what the user wishes.to do next, which in turn would help them in making better decisions.