product designer
High Risk Pregnancies
Role:
- Lead designer
Team
- Computer scientist - 2 Health tech engineers
Duration:
16 weeks
Industry:
Health / academic project
0.0 Background
As part of the Cornell Tech program a Stealth startup focused in improve health outcomes and reduce maternity and fertility costs proposed to us this exploratory project to find a way to reduce High Risk pregnancies in the US.
HMW help encourage and empower women with high risk pregnancies to follow an education and prevention plan curated by medical professionals so that they might lower their risk of complications during the pregnancy and birth?
0.1 Project timeline
1. 0 Research plan
In order to immersive into high risk pregnancies we conducted the following:
SME interviews
Gynecologists/Obstetricians
Neonatologists
Women who have had more than one risky pregnancy
Desk research
Competitive analysis
IDI (in-depth interviews)
Women are currently facing risky pregnancies
Women who have given birth in the last 2 years
Women’s family members who accompanied them during pregnancy:
Mother
Significant other
2.0 Findings
What's a high risk pregnancy
It’s really an umbrella term for conditions that significantly increase the risk of complications for mother and child. That could be something like obesity, pre-existing hypertension, diabetes that develops during pregnancy, etc.
Studies estimate that 6-8% of all pregnancies are high risk, meaning roughly 300,000 US pregnancies every year.
Complications
Between 1998-2009, the rate of serious complications (heart attack, stroke, severe bleeding and kidney failure) during or after childbirth roughly doubled among U.S. women (to 129/10,000) (CDC).
Anxiety
Even women with healthy pregnancies will have many moments of anxiety. They will turn to google or contact their doctors. Sometimes being told that “this is normal” just makes them feel worse.
Pregnancy apps
There are already many apps that are used by future moms to track their pregnancies:
At home monitoring
Women with High risk pregnancies are asked to track their markers regularly:
Blood sugar 4 times a day
Blood pressure 2 times a week.
However, many of them are still using paper trackers which are hard to keep track and easy to lose or get damaged.
3.0 Ideation
HMW generate trust and provide a sense of calm and control, but at the same time using tech to provide better care?
As a team we came up with more than 15 ideas and narrowed them down to the following 5:
Personal Assistant Chatbot: the chatbot can use contextual clues and patient data to triage whether the patient needs to contact a real nurse
Instagram Stories: leverage the time they spend on social networks to reduce their anxiety and give them useful tips. Organize accounts by due date that women can follow to get some useful tips everyday, during different times.
Pregnancy dictionary: An in-context pregnancy dictionary could be used in the browser when women are googling cases related to their pregnancy to explain medical terms in an understandable way.
Use CV & NLP to convert after visit summaries into a to do list: so women can keep track of the doctor’s recommendations and indications in a todo list.
A Blood Pressure & Blood Sugar Tracking platform with computer vision: Two of most common conditions for High Risk Pregnancies are hypertension and gestational diabetes. For patients with these chronic conditions, at home monitoring is a big key to patient empowerment. Devices like blood pressure cuffs and glucose monitors are slowly getting “smarter” with bluetooth, but the vast majority of people are still tracking values on paper. We thought it would be cool if we could use computer vision, so a smartphone app that quickly reads the e-ink screen and uploads it to a dashboard. Tracking can really help patients see if BP numbers are high because doctors make them nervous or if the need different dosages of medications.
4.0 Design and experimentation
Wireframing
High fidelity
