erica lee

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PillPal

Health engagement and accountability with a smart pill box

Team

Hannah Mei

Xing Guo

Elleyce Pahang

My Roles

Physical prototyping

User Research

Winter 2017

PillPal is a smart pill box and app designed to help a breast cancer patient, Jocelyn, remember to take their pills. These devices are designed to simplify her pill intake experience while keeping her engaged and accountable for her health.

Streamlining medication schedules

As a breast cancer patient, Jocelyn has to keep track of a variety of medication and be reactive to prescription changes as well. This makes it tedious to update. PillPal makes it easy to scan pharmacy issued barcodes and make updates to her schedule.

Keeping track

PillPal uses Bluetooth to sync the pill box with the app to send accurate updates on whether Jocelyn has taken her pills or not to ensure she stays on a consistent schedule. It also makes it easy to remind Jocelyn when to refill her medication.

Staying accountable

Family plays a big role during Jocelyn's recovery. She can opt in to have PillPall send weekly updates to her loved ones so they are informed of her journey. This also keeps her accountable.

What was the process to get here?

Research Methods

While the goal during our research process was to gather as much information and insight as possible on the user, an equally important objective was to have the user be a co-designer. We wanted her to be part of making essential decisions that drove our final design so the product would truly meet her needs.

Ethnographic Interviews

This stage was about understanding the user and identifying potential areas of design. We learned that the hospital gives patients barcodes that are scanned to print out a list of medication that the patient has to take. This was essential in driving us forward in the direction of designing a better process for taking medication.

Cultural Probes Kit

Cultural probes gave insight on pain points within our user’s daily routines and activities. It was also a method for us to gain a deeper understanding of our user’s personality and inspire design ideas.

Participatory Workshop

We created a workshop consisting of three activities (making, telling, enacting) that would fully incorporate her as our co-designer; giving her the opportunity to provide valuable contribution to the design process. At this stage, we gained insight on what her ideal pillbox would integrate.

Concept Refinement

From the very beginning, we wanted to incorporate some sort of interface that our user could visually see. This was an opportunity to combine both physical and digital elements to build a cohesive system that would keep her accountable. We did some ideation sketches and took our research to start and narrow down our our ideas to three concepts. The feedback we got was to think about combining both the wallet case and phone app.