Health Design by us
"Patient-Centered Design & the Maker Movement to Healthcare"
We are a collaborative of patients and caregivers, healthcare providers and researchers, designers and artists, engineers and technologists, and public health professionals from the University of Michigan and surrounding community, who are passionate about patient-centered participatory design and applying the model of the maker movement to healthcare. Our mission is to facilitate the design thinking process between patients and healthcare professionals to create opportunities for innovation in education, research, and clinical care delivery.
Health emojis
We are building emoji sticker packs for teens and children with chronic conditions to express themselves and communicate about common issues with style! We work with patient partners and their families to get their expert opinions as we develop these stickers.
Make-an-app workshop
This was another curricular collaboration for HealthDesignBy.Us. In the spring of 2014, Matthew Kenyon taught a Virtual Reality Mobile Applications course at the Stamps School of Art and Design. Students were asked to create and prototype an original mobile app that focuses on one of the following health-related categories: drugs and alcohol, well-being/mental health, or nutrition/food awareness. Joyce Lee served as the medical advisor to the students. The students presented their final projects at the end of the semester and awards were presented. The top winner’s app called The Happy Project was created to increase the user’s self-awareness of quality of life by logging how the user’s feelings, activities, and comparing the results to others’ happiness scores. Second place went to Xiaoying He (one of our summer interns) for her app called Eyecare U, which is an app that teaches you how to massage your eyes.
Diabetes Conversation Cards
When our student collaborators and designers (Sam Oliver, Nick Reid, and Xiaoying He) went to the Mott diabetes clinic to spend time with patients, they identified some common issues in communicating with patients. As Xiaoying describes:
When we were trying to work with the patients to identify problems and potentially design solutions for the clinic, we found that it was too time consuming to start from scratch with every patient. And it was also hard to explain what our team was doing in a short amount of time. We realized that we could create a more intuitive and user-friendly method to approach this participatory design process. The solution came up as a card-sorting game designed for patients to sort out the most troublesome problems for them.
Thus, the Diabetes Conversation Cards were born! The stack of cards can be given to patients at the beginning of a visit, and they can pick their top 3 desired topics of conversation. The cards are an effective tool for starting a conversation about barriers to managing diabetes and blank ones can be used to come up with new ideas.