Norr.
A Home Blood Test Service.
By Natalie Bhanji & Wanhang Zhao. In collaboration with Sony.
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Case.
Product design/ Service design.
Student project.
2020.
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Team.
By Natalie Bhanji & Wanhang Zhao.
In collaboration with Sony.
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My role.
Discovery/ Development/ UX & UI
Norr is a solution of the problem: how patients living in remote places can get good healthcare, by getting accurate and painless blood test, no matter age or economy.
Norr can help by giving more accurate and less risk of contaminated blood tests because of no traveling is required or that it takes too long time between when the blood is taken and the examination of the blood. Reducing the need for traveling long distance for getting in contact with a blood specialist. This will open up for good healthcare for patients that lacks funds to travel. Or in case that the patient can’t travel, for instance pregnant women, that’s still needs healthcare.
Being a solution on the lack of medical professionals and experts in remote places. It is an easy process that requires no special training, which means volunteers can help with taking blood test or the patient can do it them self. The Information/analysing of the blood can be done by a expert wear ever in the world, no limitation to place.
“How may we create a safe, painless and accurate home blood test service for people who lives in remote places?”
Research.
Persona
Personas was based on on interviews. From the interviews we learned that patients that lives in remote places need to take regular blood test and consultations with their doctors, e.g. patients with renal impairment, feels that they need to sacrifice a lot of time and energy to travel between home and hospital/healthcare center. And thus feel like they loses control over their life.
Development.
After analyzing the researchers and interviews we understood that we needed to incorporate three parts of design to create a safe, painless and accurate home blood test service for people who lives in remote places:
Blood test analyzer and needles to be able to take a painless blood test at home.
Service around them to give the user the knowledge of the machine and health-care from the doctors.
App for the user to easily understand their result, giving them back the feeling of being in control of their own care and life.
What happens after blood has been taken?
The information collected from the blood specimen is send up to the cloud
where it’s analyzed before the essential information is distributed to patient and physician.
What happens in the cloud?
By compering the patients blood specimen and medical records to a vast library of data from other patients, the databas of clinical literature and medical guidelines Norr comes up with a few diagnoses based on probability. The idea is that Norrs recommendations will be valued by medical personnel.
This sophisticated analysis identifies specific treatment options that the patients is most likely to benefit from, given their unique profile. This will enable doctors to personalize treatments, let them treat more patients and make more accurate decisions.
Improvement in diagnostik technics and treatment approaches, the collection of data analysis from medical health records and sophisti- cated clinical decision support software will enable us increasingly personalize treatment for patients. This means that doctors could actually see more patients and make more accurate decision.
Development of the app.
What did we learn from user testing?
After user testing we understood that it was important that the app hade:
Possibility change the text size and color background to be able to per- sonalize the app after the users need.
To use symbols to esay show the user what to do.
That the result needs to be easy to understand, the use of color and symbols is necessary for this, and that information from the result should be easy to access.
That contact with doctor should not be in the app but instead be a choice for the user to contact their doctor outside the app e.g. by face- time.
This information we incorporated into the design of the app.
Picture shows user teststing.
Result.
How can Norr help in remote places outside of Sweden?
Norr can be a tool for medical personnel and experts to reach out to places where because of distance and isolation they can't today. Norr can be used individually or by many different patients without compromising hygiene. By placing Norr in local healthcare centers, brough by doctors/nurses when traveling to the locations or are placed at the home of the patients, it can reach out to patients that otherwise don't have less opportunities to come in contact with blood experts.
Those with low education in healthcare can operate the machine which means that the patients them self, locals and/or volunteers that knows the area, can take a short introduction, like a webseminar, to become a part of social stable health system. By using digital systems, smart phones, tablets, laptops or stationary computers at the local healthcare center, information about the blood sample can be shared with the patient and local physicians. This can give the patient a understanding about their overall health conditions, be used as a basis for discussions between patient, doctors and experts and be a way for patients in remote areas to come in contact with experts without traveling far, moving or be in risk of compromise the blood sample.
Experts all over the world can help analysing the blood, there is no need to be on site. This will give the patient opportunity to come in contact with help they otherwise never would have gotten.
Exempel how Norr can help in remote places:
Nhulunbuy Hospital provides healthcare services to remote Aboriginal communities in Australia. One issue in places like Nhulunbuy is physi- cally reaching the patients. Teams of doctors and nurses would drive or fly out to remote homelands for a week or longer to perform on-site check-ups and collect samples to bring back. They have tried drones but the weather and bushfires can prevent the blood samples from reaching the experts in time.
In this case Norr could be of value for the doctors. If a doctor or nurse bring Norr with them to the Aboriginal communities, the blood samples can be taken and the information can be send to the experts without any risk contaminate the blood test. The blood sample can be analysed and people in the these communities can get help much faster than if the medical personnel had to travel back and forth. This can reduce the risk of spreading diseases further and reduce time of suffering.
