Service design project: Warm Hands Network

A five week project raging from 02.03.2009 – 03.04.2009

Visiting faculty: Brian Rink from Ideo San Fransisco
Resident faculty: Simona Maschi Co-founder of CIID

Contributors to the project:
Alice Pintus
Tobias toft
Sarasif Kjærsgaard
Magnus Bendtsen

Context
The brief was to work within the domain of Telemedicine and COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease): What is it like to live with COPD and what needs and desires do people that live with COPD have?
As a case we got introduced to the area of telemedicine and how it has the possibility to change and hopefully improve the life of the COPD patient. The project was introduced to us by Doctor Klaus Phanareth, AMA responsible Steffen Hogg and PhD Anders Kjær. Furthering our knowledge into the patients perspective Charlotte Fuglsang from The Danish Lung Association give us a glance into the world of the COPD patient and how their network is trying to support people diagnosed with COPD. Finally Lise Witte from the ABT Foundation gave a talk on labour saving technologies and how there will be fever “warm hands” in the future but how technology should ensure that the available hands are used for actual caring and social contact.

Idea
The Warm Hands Network is a service that provides discreet support to COPD patients in order to improve their mobility and therefore their life quality. The service works as a safety net that can help the patient both on an everyday basis and in an emergency situation.

The service consists of 3 levels:

ONLINE:
A website that contains shared knowledge on accessibility to different venues, a “heat” map that visualizes the level of safety (health care facilities) in a certain area and a travel planner that provides public transport information that considers a COPD patient’s needs.

MOBILE:
A direct contact to the healthcare system in the form of a contact nurse that can be reached
anytime through a Telemedicine mobile phone device.

LOCAL:
A customised offer in all the venues that are part of the Warm Hands Network.

The concept video:

Warm Hands Nework concept video from Magnus Bendtsen on Vimeo.

Proces
The first two weeks we shared insights and research between the two groups working with COPD. Trying to cover as much ground as possible we went to interview patients in small groups while those left in the studio did desk research and organised insights. When we had the opportunity we shared our learning’s and insights with each other in the afternoon informing the following day’s research. A couple of events had significant importance. Meeting the COPD patient in their own home meant getting a unique peek inside their lives. At first being amazed and thinking that maybe the disease was not as severe as we believed and then beginning to notice small indications that their stories might not be exaggerated. Meeting people who had symptoms in varying degrees also put a lot of perspectives on our research. Meeting a person who dignified tells you that they wish their life was soon at an end as an experience that stays with you for a long time. On the more lively side we also got to sit it on session doing physical therapy and networking.

Our research went on all through the project and culminated in a co-creation session in week 4 where we together with a volunteer COPD patient mapped out her action radius and gathered her recommendations for daytrips. Taking these recommendations to another volunteer and having her try them out was a huge experience landing in sense of method somewhere between a user test and a conceptual video.

Key insights
Working with COPD patients was a great experience for me. I have a love for people in particular difficult situations and learning about how they cope and manage was amazing as well as seeing the power of their will. Off course this was not always the case but the people that agreed to participate in our research were all brave people living their lives under very difficult conditions.
Living with COPD means that you have to be extremely self aware and to self diagnose the severity of your condition every morning you wake up. Depending on the severity of your conditions getting out of bed can take hours having to wait for medication to take effect. COPD patients are characterized by a shortness of breath making for instance stairs a particular challenge. Moving about in the home can for some be a challenging affair as well as standing for longer periods of time. Moving about outside demands that there is little or no wind as pushing the used air out of the lungs can be difficult. This means that the mobility of a COPD patient is restricted by weather and woe and if the person allows this to take mental effect the results can be social isolation, alienation and depression. On top of that if a COPD patient has a seizure of panic it can be more dangerous then a heart attack. Since most of the people we talked to where not inclined to talk about their disease it becomes a dangerous mix of a severe physical condition and reluctance on behalf of the patient to speak about their disease as not to get comments like “you were a smoker, you brought this on yourself” or even worse “I can see there is nothing wrong with you”. Having between 25 and 30% of your lung capacity is not something I would wish for anyone. COPD is however also a disease in which the patient’s way of dealing with symptoms and everyday life makes a great difference. This means significant venues of opportunity in information design, product design and service design. We choose to focus on mobility, addressing the issue of privacy and the need to have medical support on the spot.

My contribution to the project
The creation of this project is probably one of the more communal projects I have participated in. Sharing insights and result the way we did in the beginning might somehow meant that we continued to work in a communal way on the project. Doing interviews and gathering insights are however something that is of great interest to me and I was very active in planning and conducting the interviews as well as documenting them.

Towards the end of the project I focused primarily on the video doing the planning and the production together with Tobias. We shot the final video in one day and edited the following two days with me doing the raw edit focusing on creating the wanted storyline and expression turning it over to Tobias for sound and fine edit. I then worked on the booklet/documentation and the presentation.

Future
We are currently having talks with the Danish Lung Association about how our design might benefit the users of their portal. Parts of our project poses technical and management challenges that we cannot solve in the next six months like making the telemedicine equipment portable/mobile and establishing a corporation between the mobile industry and the Health care system. What we might be able to do in a relatively short amount of time is to make information from the different transport service providers accessible in one site which could be of immediate value to a person suffering from COPD. Also enabling the users to share knowledge based on location and accessibility could potentially have a large impact on their everyday life. Talks continue and we hope to establish some kind of corporation.