Viewing all ideas posted in Health and Wellness
As the daughter of an Emergency Room doctor and nurse who wanted me to follow their lead into medicine, I had a somewhat unusual childhood. I experienced my first human dissection at age eleven and treated a simulated cerebral aneurysm before I could drive. While I was being molded into the future Dr. Valentine through every “doctor camp” offered in North America, I was taking mail-order art classes and attempting to sell my masterpieces in a local restaurant. I was expected to become a doctor, but my true passion lay in making things.
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Touch screen installations are by no means new. We have been using them in airports and ATMs for years now. With the advances in computing and gestural touch interfaces, we are starting to see them even be considered at the local Ann Taylor. This trend has often times made processes more streamlined and allowed people to interact with information and services in ways that were impossible a few years back. There is a downside to this however, germs. New studies have shown that our touchscreen devices, most notably our iPads are germ magnets. So while we should not be running back to our caves in fear, we need to understand the implications of touch-based interfaces — especially in the context of public environments. One place in particular where touch-based interactions pose a serious hazard are hospitals. The CDC estimates that 1.7 million hospital-associated infections, or Nosocomial infections occur each year with 99,000 resulting in death. When germs are a deadly issue, the last thing you want is to have thousands of people touching the same thing.
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The baby boomer generation is starting to retire and policy changes mean more people will have access to healthcare services. How will the healthcare system cope with the influx of new patients? That’s a question Chris McCarthy, Director of the Innovation Learning Network and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, brought to the table at the latest San Francisco Service Design Drinks event hosted by Adaptive Path*. The challenge: how can non-healthcare services and systems support or offset the existing healthcare systems?
Designers, healthcare experts, and a fair number of non-designers interested in the topic came…
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Some of the most fascinating examples of journalism are where the author literally steps into the shoes of the people he or she is interested in and experiences their struggles first hand. To write Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin artificially darkened his skin to experience life as an African-American in 1959. In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich set out to live on minimum wage to expose the difficulties faced by low income workers.
During a recent diabetes-related project, our project team informally conducted a similar experiment: What if we took on the personas of newly-diagnosed diabetics and sought to experience…
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Many UX people find themselves in organizations that are dominated by other schools of thought: business management, engineering, etc. That’s just one of the things that I find so inspirational about talking to Ryan Armbruster about the Mayo Clinic’s SPARC Innovation Program. The program integrates research and design methods into the culture of medicine and science at Mayo Clinic to repeatedly generate meaningful changes that improve the lives of patients and the effectiveness of the medical system supporting them.
Ryan spoke to the ability to connect design to the core values of the clinic in our recent interview:
“…
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