Graduate Thesis Design
Diagnostic mHealth for autoimmune disorders PainAware
What is PainAware?
1 / Project Goals
By developing this application, the goal of this project is to utilize the advantages of mHealth products to improve the current level of pain assessment mobile applications. Through sufficient market analysis and interviews with health care providers, this application could achieve a higher level of market acceptance.
This knowledge is expected to have important applications for user experience and interface design in the field of healthcare.
2 / Challenges
This application aims at the dilemma of the misconnected point where patients cannot provide a detailed pain history to physicians. Especially for the diagnosis of autoimmune disorders, it is essential to know how the pain is evolving each time and how do the patients feels.
Pain journaling contains much valuable information. Pain location, pain intensity, pain area, and pain type are all determinants when people are experiencing undiagnosed chronic pain.
3 / Scope of work
1. Design Research
Through comprehensive content analysis and literature review, a design gap has emerged.
3. UI Design
Multiple iterations of user interface design are crucial to this project. And IOS design guideline should be taken into consideration.
2. UX Design
Following the research and project goals, an information instructure and user flow were designed. Real usage scenarios are essential to mobile application design.
4. User Testing
Validation of user testing can discover many internal problems. Testing with real patients is informative and valuable.
Exploration of the current market
For disease management applications, I conducted content analysis.
72 apps from the Apple App Store were selected, all of which are about logging symptoms and chronic pain. Based on my observations, I categorized the features provided in these applications as follows:
• Communication with professionals
• Anatomical Accuracy
• Self-diagnosis of symptoms
• Reporting/Journaling
• Medication intake
• Daily activity
• Appointment scheduling
• Personal health data
• Self-diagnosis of autoimmune disorders
• Paid or free
• For journaling pain/ chronic pain.(Pain measurement)
I gave scores to these features. On the scale of 0-5, where a score of 0 means there is no such feature, and a score of 5 represents this feature is well-designed.
Out of 72 mHealth apps reviewed, only 39.4% allow a person to journal/ report their chronic pain.
Then I conducted a comparative analysis of these features. From analyzing this data I found a design gap. All of the journaling apps are useful for patients who have undiagnosed chronic pain; however, what can be journaled varies (exercise, sleep, nutrition, pain location, duration of pain, level of pain, descriptions, etc.)
I zoomed in to analyze only those apps for their ability to communicate with a healthcare professional and for their accuracy anatomically. I looked at these attributes because those two factors are essential for diagnosing many diseases that cause chronic pain (Crohn's Disease, lupus, fibromyalgia, etc.).
However, most of them do not communicate with professionals. Only one app scored as a 5.
This is the histogram of apps which are anatomically accurate. Most of the apps have a high level of anatomical accuracy. There are 17 of them that scored higher than 3.
The line chart (below) clearly shows a gap: only one existing app communicates well with doctors, and it lacks anatomical accuracy.
The data shows that there is a design gap!
No existing apps available really communicate well with doctors.
Ahd those that do generally lack anatomical accuracy.
Thesis show time!
