UniBand

Duration

Jun - Dec 2019

My role

UX Design, UX Research, Front End

UniBand is a tremor tracker system which helps patients with Parkinson’s disease to acquire insights combining their tremor intensity changes with medication intake, diet, and physical activities.

This project is a student-driven project initially engaged with and men- tored by the UbiComp research lab at UW and Prof. Shwetak Patel.

Team members: Evie Zhang, Gero Bergk, Joohyung Kim, Yuanwei Zhang

Problem

Parkinson’s Disease

A brain disorder that leads to shaking, stiffness, and difficulty with walking, balance, and coordination

( 1 )

Every year, roughly 60,000 Americans are newly diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

( 2 )

It requires perpetual care and management for patients and their families since the disease has no cure.

( 3 )

There is no sustainable service or product that allows individuals with PD and their doctors to consistently track their progress over time and give a clear understanding of their progress changes.

Tremor makes patients unable to do the simplest daily tasks.

🌟Challenge:
How might we make the management of their disease easier and more efficient for patients with PD (Parkinson’s Disease)?

Brief

The 6-month design process

Results

UniBand

( 1 )

Is the first consumer-facing tremor-tracking product

( 2 )

Is a complete service to manage Parkinson’s Disease

( 3 )

Brings opportunity to work with Evergreen Clinical Collaboration

✈️️️ How did we arrive at this solution?
6 min read

User research

Primary research :: What is bothering people with PD

Having some basic knowledge about PD through secondary research, our strategy was to meet patients and physicians, as many as we can, because no one in our team had a medical background or clinical experience about PD.

We ended up with interviewing 25 patients and 3 doctors, and having solid data from 52 surveys. This gave us a better understanding of patients’ situation and what is missing in the communication between patients and doctors.

Where we found our participants

Some personal tracking documents that patients and caregivers provided, which explained the medication complexity

Insights from surveys

Primary research :: Key findings

In general

It’s so hard for patients with PD to keep tracking everything and to aggregate all information for insights.

( 1 )

Tremor: Among all symptoms of PD, tremor bothers people the most. It makes the simplest things in the world extremely hard to do.

( 2 )

Doctor visit frequency: Most of patients visits their physicians 2-3 times/year.

( 3 )

Memory method: Most of patients could only describe their progress using memory method when meeting with their doctors.

( 4 )

Medication and its adjustment: Meds can be really complex for PD. Physicians will adjust patients’ meditation based on their description of symptoms.

“I want to know the activities I was doing when I had the most tremor of that day.”

-- Ilene, one of patients we interviewed

Ideation

Enable PD patients to live a easier life

The problem that we want to address is the lack of objective and continuous data that represents the progression of Parkinson’s and how it is affected over time by daily factors such as med intake, diet, and physical activities.

Then, the team came up an idea of developing a wristband tremor tracking device and a companion mobile app that can show PD progress over time with other important data reported by users.

Design iterations

Low-fidelity sketching

V1: Sketched a basic flow so that I could communicate
with teammates efficiently.

Having the first low-fi flow, I discussed some main features in the app with my team members. We all agreed on one thing: figuring out what makes the best data visualization for the tremor report was our top priority.

I started to make plans on testing this part with patients to help us make the decision.

User testing

Four types of monthly tremor report that we used for user testing.
The second image was proved to be the most useful one.

Five daily tremor logs that we used for user testing. The third image with a comparison between two days’ data was proved to be the most useful one.

Many thanks to all participants in our tests and tremor data collecting sessions. They’re amazing people and really helped us a lot!

Key findings include:

( 1 )

Desirability: All participants found the design helpful and would like to use the app if it exists.

( 2 )

Line graph with comparison: For the tremor log, the tremor activity data needs to be explained. Line graph is more acceptable. People like having comparison among data visually available.

( 2 )

Missed dosage: People like the missed dosage time reflecting on the graph

I analyzed findings from user tests
using this affinity map

Medium-fidelity prototype

V2: I made this medium-fidelity clickable prototype using Framer X.

Based on the feedback gathered from our participants, I created a new set of more detailed design. We conducted more tests utilizing this interactive prototype.

Final deliverables

System diagram

In the end, with all improvements been made, I coded the front end of our final functional app using Flutter. The back end was programmed by other teammates.

With our solution, users can simply wear a wristband which tracks their tremor and take notes of their medication intake, activities and diets via the mobile app. A monthly insight report generated from Google Cloud Platform is also provided, which patients/caregivers can print out bring with when they visit doctors. This allows patients with PD to have more concrete data for their progress.