Patient empowerment via a smartwatch activity coach application

Abstract

A new healthcare domain is growing which is called eHealth. eHealth solutions are getting deployed in order to tackle the ongoing problem of an increase in patients with a chronic disease in The Netherlands. Medicine Men has developed a eHealth solution for patients with chronic diseases which is called the Emma Activity Coach. This application runs on a Fitbit smartwatch and is part of the Emma system which consists out of a smartphone application called Emma.6 and a desktop application called Emma dashboard. The aim of the Emma Activity Coach and the Emma system is to empower patients with a chronic disease in monitoring their activity in their own environment with the support of an informal caregiver and a healthcare professional in order to improve the quality of life of the patient. Project focus The focus of this project is on exploring the target group of the Emma Activity Coach and its needs in order to improve the Emma system. The user interaction and experience of the user are explored. Problems that come up are translated into design iterations which result in a proposed final design that fulfils the found needs and the set design vison. The ecosystem of the project consist out of three parties: • The patient • The informal caregiver • The healthcare professional Target group Literature research and interviews with several healthcare professionals showed that the use of the Emma Activity Coach would be beneficial for patients with chronic diseases such as COPD, Type 2 diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease (CVD). The target group is characterised by comorbidity; I.e. suffers from more than one chronic disease. This means that there is an overlap of disease symptoms of which activity, and therefore the use of the Emma Activity Coach is found to be beneficial. Target group challenge and needs The target group is explored via several patient interviews who suffer from COPD and/or Type 2 diabetes, three informal caregivers and three healthcare professionals. The main challenge for the target group is knowing their activity limits in order to gain back trust in their physical and mental condition. The target group has problems with getting enough activity or sometimes getting too much activity, which is often the case for patients with COPD. Their disease makes it hard for them to recognize their limits due to constant being short of breath. The challenge of the target group is translated into four needs; the need for autonomy, security, stimulation and support. Several design criteria are setup according to these needs and translated in the concluding design vision; to make the patient feel in control of their physical and mental health condition, by providing clear feedback on their activity. Design process Several user studies with COPD patients who had experience with the use of the Emma Activity Coach on a Fitbit smartwatch were performed. Interviews, observations and user tests revealed multiple design and comprehensibility problems with the current design of the Emma Activity Coach. These problems were tackled via three iteration rounds with the target group participants. The Emma dashboard of the healthcare professional, with the focus on physiotherapists, is also explored by interviewing 4 physiotherapists who have made use or still use the Emma dashboard in combination with the Emma Activity Coach. The iteration is presented as a starting point for further development. The evaluation with the target group shows that the proposed design of the Emma Activity Coach achieves the set design vision of this project.