My team was asked to create a solution that improved the quality of life for those involved in a battle against Huntington's Disease (HD). HD patients face rapidly deteriorating health conditions and cognitive abilities. One such side effect is having little to no control over mood swings and emotional outbursts. Emotional outbursts are taxing on the patient and also their caretaker. Many HD patient caretakers are close family members who dedicate their life to helping the patient, such as a spouse or a family member who does not have or has not yet been diagnosed with HD themselves. The caretaker in particular is at high risk of burn out and mental health issues. As such, my team focused creating a solution to improve the quality of life for the caretaker in particular.
I focused specifically on designing a set of interventions for when HD patients are at high risk of experiencing an emotional outburst or is already in the midst of an outburst. An apple watch worn by the patient tracks biodata such as heart rate. The caretaker mobile app tracks the watch data and receives alerts when the patient biometrics indicate likelihood of an outburst. In the event of an outburst or oncoming outburst, the watch and app both display a set of cool down activities the caretaker can guide the patient through.
The historic data collected through the app can be shared to relevant health care professionals to make telehealth appointments smoother, and ease the caretaker's burden to remember all the incidents the doctors should know about.
My role: I lead a team of 6 designers and 30 engineers to develop the overall story of our solution and what it meant to the involved stakeholders. I was the lead point of contact between the designers and engineers to communicate design ideals and balance that with engineering capability to create a feasible solution.