Healthcare Screening Systems for Cardiovascular Diseases


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Creator/Artist: Naveed Ahmed

Category: Interaction Design

Document: P2 Project

Batch: 2012-2014

Source: India,   IDC IIT Bombay

Period:  2009-2018

Medium: Report pdf

Supervisor: Prof. Anirudha Joshi


Detailed Description

Over the past two decades, sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy diet and occupational stress have led to a sharp rise in cases of cardio-vascular diseases (CVDs). Early subtle signs in these cases unusually go unnoticed and the disease gets identified when irreversible negative consequences become apparent.Through user studies, it was found that people neglect their health and get checkedup only when someone close to them falls sick; and sometimes only to realize that it is too late. These diseases could be avoided if diagnosed early through regular checkups and with enough awareness amongst susceptible groups. In the long run, this can prevent chronic illnesses. The project hence aims to create solutions for easy screening that would facilitate quick and hassle-free health check-ups.The project had three outcomes—trigger events that help engage new users into the health system, a healthcare kiosk where a user can get himself checked-up and an online interface to manage health data. All these are interconnected as a larger system.The social network of a patient who recently underwent a CVD is used to trigger and encourage preventive health behaviour among susceptible connections. This is done via direct intervention of the affected persons and online social networks. The social network includes the relationship of the user with members of the family and society. The healthcare kiosk is an independent self-service setup where people can go and get themselves checked-up for signs that cause lifestyle diseases. The kiosk has devices that measure body parameters and collect minimum information required for initial analysis. Suggestions and recommendations on further detailed check-ups, doctors’ information and future check-up schedules are then provided to the user based on the analysis The setup integrates with an online interface that takes health and family medical history of the user and assesses the risk to a particular disease over time. To predict risk, factors like hereditariness of a disease in the family and current medical data are used. The solution also encourages users to develop health behaviours that may help transform the current curative healthcare system to a more ‘collaborative’ one. As devices used were mainly self-help, the user evaluation concentrated on how (and if) the users understood the instructions provided to use these devices and their ability to finish the tests successfully.The devices were tested with the target user group and also those who have used personal medical devices earlier. Most of them could follow the video instructions and perform the tests themselves easily without much intervention. Part of the evaluation also consisted to social prototyping and finding the effect of how the message spreads across one’s contacts. For this, the growth of an online questionnaire over time were analysed along with interviews. The online questionnaire showed impressive results with most of the users referring family members than social contacts. As part of the future work, there is a need to improve the motivation factor in the social network. The apparent and perceived hygiene of the kiosk is of prime importance that would drive people to actually use the system.