what i am trying to solve...

Having good mental health is important since it helps to determine how we handle bad emotions, and make healthy choices. Good mental health in early childhood is the fundamental basis for being able to achieve personal well-being trough your whole life. However, anxiety and other overwhelming emotions are experienced by almost everyone, especially for those who are in a situation requiring hospitalization.

Anxiety, ADHD, and depression affect at least 1 in 10 hospitalized children and can lead to miscommunication. Due to this, staff and parents may not be on the same page with the child, which can lead to missed opportunities to identify an effective treatment for them.

According to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - Research Institute.

That is why:

My audience will not only be children (6 - 10 years old), but also parents, doctors and psychologists.

The goal is to achieve a timeless treatment that can be effective in both sides (physical and psychological).

for a moment i thought if there was actually a solution for this...

but that's how I came up with the idea of an app that can track mental and physical health of a hospitalized child.

For this app I will do three different and interconnected interfaces: parents, the staff (doctor and psychologist) and the child.

This app works through inputs the child will introduce by talking to a character (dog or cat)

Parents and doctors can interact with the inputs trough their own app where they can make notes, comments and keep track of the child together.

Parents will not be the first to see the children's input. The inputs will have to be seen by the doctors first so they can comment and explain the reason for the child's emotions or symptoms. This way, the parent can avoid becoming too emotional, and be able to understand why their child may be feeling a certain way.

MAIN IDEA IS:

The medical part (mental and physical) can work in harmony with the parents to achieve an effective and timely treatment.

I wanted to understand better how users feel about the idea of the app. So, I conducted an open-question questionnaire about this subject with a psychologist, oncologist, two parents, and a teenager who was hospitalized due to a terminal illness for a few months when she was six years old.

PARENT'S QUESTIONS

What would you like to know (physically or mentally) most about your child while hospitalized?
What do you think about an app that can track your children mental and physically health, where you can be aware of every situation?
What would you like that app to have?
Ideas or thoughts.

"I want to understand how

I may help my child feel better."

"I don't want my child to feel anxious."

"Several indicators could indicate well-being in the child."

"It is important to save time while doing the diagnosis."

PSYCHOLOGIST AND DOCTOR'S QUESTIONS

What are some issues you see in children with terminal disease and parents of those children? (Explain issues)
What are the opportunities to use technology to help with this and what are the problems to think of?
What do you think about an app that can track the children mental and physically health where you can be aware of every situation?
How much helpful you think would be?
What would you like to that app to have?

CHILD'S QUESTIONS

In this interview, it was key for me to understand her experience during her hospitalization, so the questions were not many but focused.

How would you describe your days at the hospital? (I wanted to understand how she developed during her stay at the hospital. I let her talk without interrupting.)
Would you have liked to have someone by your side all that time? What how that friend would be like? (In this part, I wanted to understand if there was a feeling of loneliness during her hospitalization, and be able to use those answers as a guide to better develop my app.)
What are your thoughts about the idea of an app that track the child's mental and physical health?

WHAT I LEARNED:

1. Psychologists and Doctors are more objective. They mentioned the word "measure" many times while talking about the child's feelings. They emphasize that the main goal is to search for a timely and effective treatment, and both agreed on the importance of working in harmony with the parents.

2. Parents are emotional. Parents' participation in taking care of a hospitalized child can help to strengthen the bond between families, yet it is not always easy since many parents can develop a great source of anxiety and stress because their child is hospitalized, which can prevent an effective treatment. Their hesitation to know how their children feel every hour can lead to parents not always being on the same page as their children's emotional state.

3. Hospitalized children tend to become confused because the change of environment from home to hospital is new, and can be scary for them. The feeling of loneliness is present during the hospitalization, and it is challenging for the child to express their symptoms and emotions in front of an adult.

With the inputs received while doing the interviews I did an

affinity diagram.

I divided it into three groups: Child 🟡, Parent 🟢 and Doctor/Psychology 🟠

Then I created

Personas

to summarize all the needs of the users creating two archetypical users to summarize the most important needs.

Before starting the process of prototyping the app, I created three different scenarios (descriptive stories with task for the users I'm designing for) to help me better understand my audience.

PARENT

You are a very busy working parent, and sadly your child has been diagnosed with a serious illness that requires hospitalization. You would like to know how your child has been feeling. The hospital provided you with an app that can keep you updated on your child's emotions.

Check how your child has been feeling.

You want to be aware of how his emotionally growth goes.

Check how your child has been doing over time.

DOCTOR

You are a doctor in charge of the health of a nine-year-old child who unfortunately is hospitalized. You want to be able to achieve an effective treatment in a short time. You want to know what symptoms the child has been having because you need to know about any physical or emotional manifestations the child has to save time with the diagnosis.

Check the inputs of the child.

You are a psychologist for the same child. You are in charge of providing therapy so the child can handle the situation more effectively, and you want to work in harmony with the parents to make treatment more efficient.

Check the inputs of the child and explain why, so the parents can be on the same page.

CHILD

You are a nine year old child who are hospitalized. You would like to talk to someone about your feelings that is not an adult. The hospital gave you a kids’s tablet with interactive games and apps to help with distraction. You open an app where you have someone to talk to.

Start using the app.

WIREFRAMES

USABILITY TESTING ROUND 1

They told me would be a good idea to include an option of "confirm" while choosing between dog or cat in the child interface.
The users wanted to see the digital version of the app.

LO-FI PROTOTYPES

PARENT INTERFACE

DOCTORS INTERFACE

CHILD INTERFACE

USABILITY TESTING ROUND 2

Parent:

Including the child's physical evolution in the growth chart can be overwhelming for the parent as the child does not always respond well to treatment.
Including the psychological evolution would be great, since parents can understand more what is happening emotionally to their child and be on the same page.

Child (I tested with the doctors too):

The interface of the child must include an option where he can introduce his age so the questions can be more accurate.
Even though the population is made up of children aged 6-12 years, there are differences in the questions they are asked to be able to make a successful diagnosis of their mental health. Therefore, I was recommended to use the questions from the UNICEF mental health surveys for the animation to ask the child.

Staff:

Besides "treatment", it would be better to have a "medical report" summarizing the child's medical history, which would be beneficial to the medical side since the medical history has many pages, and having a synthesis of it would help to save time during the diagnosis which is necessary when a child is hospitalized.
Include the health area where the child is, as well as a brief introduction about the reason for the hospitalization and the number of days the child has been hospitalized.
It is also important to have control of the physical health, so instead of "growth", it would be good to replace it with a "follow-up" of the child, where the software includes the KREBS table as a guide to identifying any anomaly in their physical state.

LO-FI PROTOTYPES

PARENT INTERFACE

DOCTOR INTERFACE

CHILD INTERFACE

USABILITY TESTING ROUND 3

Parent:

It would be a good idea to have a navigation bar to make it easier to navigate through the options.
The characters are too small for an older person.

Staff:

Include why the child is in that area of medicine on the home page.
Have a summary of the child's diagnosis following the terms: CIE10.
Include basic information about the child.

Child (I tested with the doctors too):

Maybe the child doesn't know how to put his age in the application.
It should have some short interactive games.
The quiz needs to be science based.

I changed the numbers on the axes of the graph to colors to make the understanding of the child's progress clearer.
Change the design of the bars in the graphic to 3D bars.

The main buttons are more straightforward to make it easy to visualize.
To ensure better monitoring of the child's health, I included the most important parts of the patient's medical record on the home page so psychologists and doctors will see that information first. (I used as guidance the ICD: International Classification of Diseases).

I changed the child's interface to be more playful and interactive.
I included the option of confirmation, in case the child wants to change the character.

In this part I'm going to test my scenarios to show how the app will work.

CHILD INTERFACE

As previously mentioned, all inputs collected from children during their conversations with the app's character are recorded, organized, filtered, and summarized into key points. These processed inputs are then sent to the doctor and integrated into their data system. Doctors can access these recordings to understand the child’s feelings, preferences, and needs. This personalized insight helps tailor treatments, build trust, and ensure a smoother recovery for hospitalized children.

DOCTOR INTERFACE

How does the doctor know what the kids are saying? The inputs gathered during the interaction between the child and the character (Fluffy or Paws) are recorded, filtered, and sent to the doctor’s interface. These recordings are accessible in the “Input” section as audio files. Both the doctor and the psychologist assigned to the child’s case can listen to the recordings and provide comments. This process ensures the child feels comfortable and cooperative, while also helping to alleviate any stress the parents may experience—stress that could otherwise affect the hospitalized child.

PARENT INTERFACE

Parents also have access to their child’s inputs, but with certain limitations. This is because there may be instances where a parent might misunderstand or overreact to something their child says, potentially disrupting collaboration between the doctors and the parent. To address this, parents have an input section where they can view the interactions between the doctors and their child’s inputs. However, as mentioned earlier, doctors can determine which inputs are appropriate for the parents to hear and which may not be suitable, allowing parents to feel actively involved in their hospitalized child’s healing process, fostering trust, reducing anxiety, and strengthening the parent-child-doctor relationship, ultimately contributing to a more supportive and effective recovery environment.

I'm explaining here the design of the brand.

What I learned and do better next time:

Keeping a simple design is harder than it seems.

Simple may be overrated because something that is simple is not necessarily easy to use. However in this app, I wanted to do something most parents and doctors will feel comfortable using it, and keeping it simple let me keep the main idea of the app.

An app that tracks mental health and physical health of a hospitalized child.

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