4 weeks, Solo Project
Experience Strategy; Visual Design, Interaction Design
Competitive Analysis, User Journey, Prototypes, Lo-fi and Hi-fi design
These are not trick questions, but common mistakes made by hundreds of thousands of people.
According to statistics:
“2/3 people of age 65+ take 5+ different prescription medications; 1/4 take 10+ medications.” (CIHI 2018)
“≈15% of older adults are under the risk of potential drug-to-drug interaction” (Dima Qato 2016)
Taking medicine itself is an unpleasant experience.
We would like to design an app to soothe the unpleasantness by ensuring people are taking the medicines correctly and helping them to avoid unnecessary side effects.
We conducted 7 interviews with patients who are taking 2+ prescriptions medicines and multiple supplements. We asked them about their experience taking multiple medicines. Through synthesis, we found 3 main pain points patients have while taking multiple medications.
Unclear of drug information
Often the only access to drug information is internet (too overwhelming) or pharmacist (not always accessible)
Don’t know which pills can be taken together
Is there side effect of taking all your medicines together? Most patients don’t know the answer if it is not mentioned by the doctors.
Constantly forget to take the pills
It happens. But the medical effects can diminish if patients keep missing doses.
Christine, age 65+
taking 6 medicines
“I want to understand my medicine, but there are too much information online and it is difficult to do all the searching for an old woman like myself”
Joe, age 60+
taking 4 medicines
“I did mention that I am taking other pills when I am filling in a form. But I am not quite sure that my doctor knows that I am taking the other pills as he never talks about whether these pills can be taken together.”
Paola, age 27
taking 3 medicines
“I always have trouble remembering taking this one kind of my medicine in the afternoon because I am always busy. If I can’t remember, I will skip”
Unclear of drug Information
How might we help people to better learn about and understand their medicines?
Don’t know which pills can be taken together
How might we caution people of potential harmful drug-to-drug interactions?
Constantly forget to take the pills
How might we remind people to take their pills promptly?
Medchecker is an app that is based on:
Since our target user is mostly people of age who are perhaps less comfortable with learning new technologies, we would like to make our app as simple as possible by:
Abandoning complex graphics and icons, so that the whole experience could be more intuitive
Only provide users with what is useful, so that they will not be discouraged from having to read too much.
When it comes to medicine, it is always a serious business. we don’t want you to miss any important information, not to mention missing your pills. That is why Medchecker serves as your “over-caring” nurse by:
Carefully explaining each step to users, e.g. why they need to check for the interactions between their drugs, with the aim that they can gain the basic medical knowledge and take right ensuing actions.
Reinforce habits. We design different ways for users to access their medicine information and remind them to take their pills, so that they won’t miss it.
When searching for medicines, Medchecker makes it easy for people to taking/scanning pictures of their label box to start, eliminating the inconvenience of reading the labels and typing in lengthy names.
Providing only the information that people are interested in and are readable for everyone, while saving the trouble of jargons and long passage, so that people won’t lose themselves in myriad of unnecessary informations.
Understanding what drug-to-drug or drug-to-food effects are at stake is the first step towards preventing the risk of potential drug interactions. Simply add medicines from the “your active medicine” list, check interactions and receive suggestions for subsequent actions.
Combatting various diseases can be lonely, which is why Medchecker wants to invite someone to be your allies. Medchecker allows sharing current pill list and schedules with caregivers, enabling them to better understand your intake history and be a part of your journey.
To help people who are taking multiple pills to better manage their intricate pill schedule, Medchecker uses clear visualization to present an overview of today’s pills, when to take them as well as which pills are taken, remaining or missed.
Receive a prompt push notification is the little nudge for those who kept forgetting to take their pills; caregivers can also choose to receive one to personally remind the patients.
I have always known that my 86-year-old grandma is taking a lot of medicines (around 10), but I have never asked her how much she knew about the side effects of each medicine, not to mention whether she was aware of the interactions between her medicines. As a matter of fact, when I did ask her, she responded with a “laissez-faire” attitude: “ I don’t really care about the effect of one particular medicine. I am taking multiple for the same disease, so as long as one of them is working, I’m good.”
Admittedly, an app is perhaps not a perfect solution to the problem. Even scientist and healthcare experts today cannot predict the interactions between many medicines (more than 5). However, this is our way of making the first step towards raising awareness to this problem. Designing an app for people like my grandma is to help them become more attentive to the potential risks, understanding their medicines better, and make the whole experience safer and easier.
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