A reflective post written by our founder, Helena Traill, on her latest design sprint at The Royal College of Art (RCA) x Imperial, where Helena is studying for a Masters of Research in Healthcare and Design. During the Behaviour Change module, each team had to produce a digital prototype, revealing the importance of physical products in a digital-first world.

Earlier this month, I was back at the RCA for a two week design sprint as part of my Masters in Healthcare & Design. The first week focused on Healthcare Innovation, and the second week on Behaviour Change.

This blog post will cover:

Expert-led talks by industry leads, from a NASA Human-centered designer to a professor from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
An inside view of a hands-on design sprint at the Royal College of Art
Medical products in healthcare
The importance of user research
Our own product: slOuch

It started with talks from experts

Big data and rapid innovation in healthcare – Dr Hendrammoorthy Maheswaran, Public Health Doctor and Economist

“We’re in the 4th Industrial Revolution all about AI and advancement of computing power and design which means there are loads of new ideas, but we need to look at all the previous innovations to understand what works and what doesn’t.”

How NASA use design during through different Concept Maturity Levels (CMLs) and how one should be ‘Designing the Design’ – Tibor Balint, Principal Human Centered Designer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Healthy behaviours are not rewarding (think hand washing and eating your 5 a day). When creating global health adverts you need to think about inputs, outputs and human motives – Robert Aunger, Associate Professor at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

How can computers persuade you to change your behaviour? – Gustav Borgefalk, Designer

“People always go for defaults with digital User Interface (UI) design and knowing about passive vs. active persuasion, when designing can make a huge difference”

And continued with practical design sprints, where we had the chance to prototype

For the Behaviour Change week, as a team we were asked to tackle the huge issue of Posture and Slouching in medical staff. This was all centered around the use of little Aurdino computers to create a physical prototype. If you haven’t come across them, an Arduino consists of both a physical programmable circuit board (often referred to as a microcontroller) and a piece of software – it was great to use both hardware and software.

To start with, I was a bit put off by the topic - I wondered how we would come up with something new, that wasn’t a spine-wearable that simply buzzed to remind you to sit up straight, or how we would even be able to make a little robot in just 3 days.

But… I was so far wrong! Our team was a wonderful mix - we consisted of engineers, clinicians and design thinkers:

Yusuf Shittu, GP Trainee and entrepreneur/founder of multiple healthcare startups
Becca Jones, Management Consultant for Life Sciences at Accenture
Laura Sanchez, Biomedical Engineer and Clinical Account Senior Specialist at Johnson and Johnson

We were also very lucky to have the help of Arduino and engineering experts Jeffrey Gough and Elena Falomo.

Framing the challenge

As with any design challenge, it is essential to frame the challenge you’re trying to tackle. So before showing you our solution, let’s get into the problem that surgeons face with both their posture and slouching.

Gaby Judah (a psychologist working on behaviour change in the Patient Safety Translational Research Centre (PSTRC) at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London) introduced us to the Behaviour Change COM-B and MINDSPACE models.

This helped us to determine the Capability of the user, the Opportunity area for innovative design and the Motivation to use our innovation.

In a nutshell, here is the problem we defined through behaviour:

Surgeons slouching when trying to get closer to the operating site during open surgery
Surgeons not noticing bad posture in themselves or others
Poor knowledge on posture and the impacts of bad posture over time

Medical products in healthcare

Now that we understood the role of behaviour in the healthcare space, it was time to move onto products. Bill Evans, a product expert with 34 years’ experience in Silicon Valley, kicked things off with an excellent talk. Bill has a wealth of experience in the medtech product design industry, but also has a great eye for photography - yet again showing that creativity and tech do go hand in hand. He demonstrated that you can be extremely technical and scientific, while also creating being an empathetic design who understand user experience.

He emphasised to us many great product design tips which you could apply to both services and digital products. Ultimately, it’s all about the user, but it is also lead by impact. Both impact of the product but also the business impact that can incur with innovative healthcare. Like better patient outcomes, reducing cost of delivering these outcomes, wellness and wellbeing and patient safety. Cost, outcomes and users experience for both the patient and the provider.

Fast-paced user research

As we only had 3 days to come up with a product, we got to work ideating and prototyping but with little knowledge of performing surgeries ourselves, we needed to address the user.

Our user interview with Chris Caddy was pivotal to our thinking - we were lucky enough to interview the retired surgeon who had back pain throughout is career. We were thinking about how our products would easily work for a surgeon; accompanying their specific routines and practices with zero inconvenience.

Chris highlighted that addressing the issue of slouching in surgeons is centered around a culture change - he expressed honestly that the best mitigating factor would be the dedicated use of pilates to strengthen your core. He added that in an ideal world every surgeon and accompanying staff would start surgery with a short pilates routine. Even if scientifically beneficial, Chris said this would not be seen as normal - it requires a decent behaviour change and cultural shift in order for the pilates to be normalised pre-surgery!

Our product: slOuch

Skip forward a few days and after lots of prototyping, a core understanding of the behaviour we were trying to change (slouching in surgeons) and some user interviews under our belt, we managed to create a product: slOuch.

slOuch is made up of three outcomes:

Product: A headpiece linked to the surgeon’s goggles, with a laser coming out of the side. When the surgeon went to slouch, it would create an annoying red target in front of them, projected onto whichever surface they looked at from that position.
Digital: The monitor in the goggles would also track data on how often the surgeon slouches and create weekly reports, possibly even linking to Apple Health. It would also nudge users to take up pilates or do stretches and core exercises.
Campaign: Taking into account our learning from Chris, we built a campaign around it both the product and digital components. We would deploy posters around hospitals and ask surgeon’s to watch the backs of others. Our slogan: ‘watch my back’.

All ended in a demo, where yes I got to dress up as a surgeon of course, and a well needed trip to the pub. Thank you Yusuf, Laura and Rebecca for your patience and hard work - we were a great team!

Dr Yusuf and myself doing a demo of slOuch during our presentation

The importance of physical products in a digital world

Ultimately, the fact that we were able to demonstrate the product, iterating and prototyping as a physical thing, meant that our users were able to more quickly understand the essence of what we were trying to achieve. Rather than using an app, it made you think in an alternative way, namely because we wanted it to be embedded within equipment that surgeons already have familiar use of - a physical part of their goggles. We didn’t want to create an intangible product that would have to be learned, remembered or complicated, as we didn’t want to disrupt surgeons’ usual, day-to-day behaviour.

What’s next?

This blog post outlined just a few days of our Masters - it’s fast-paced, that’s for sure - but there is a lot more to come. I am now in my final 6 months of research, studying the question:

How can Digital Storytelling bridge the gap between physical and mental wellbeing in our healthcare system?

This question for me encapsulates Social Prescribing - this is when health professionals refer patients to support within the community, in order to improve their health and wellbeing - at its core is community. I believe that digital storytelling can bring communities together, whether that is a social media influencer sharing their story, a book like my 100 Stories book, or even a short animation.

Please do reach out if you’re interested in hearing more about my Masters, or we can collaborate in any way that suits.

Thank you!

Why products matter in healthcare

It started with talks from experts