Challenge: Create a digital tool to help a person with an illness
Individual Project
Personal Responsibilities: Sacrificial Prototyping, Digital Prototyping, Digital Design, User Research, Secondary Research, User Interviews
Time Frame: 3 weeks
Individual Project
Personal Responsibilities: Sacrificial Prototyping, Digital Prototyping, Digital Design, User Research, Secondary Research, User Interviews
Time Frame: 3 weeks
People diagnosed with Schizophrenia often have auditory, visual, or tactile hallucinations that they need help identifying and quelling. There are exercises called Grounding Techniques that allow them to do just that. I wanted to create a hub for them to access the most common techniques that would apply to whatever symptoms they were experiencing. Allowing them to have their most helpful techniques available to them at the touch of a button.
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Symptoms
One common grounding technique is talking to a person you know and trust. The first option the user has is to contact someone they know like a friend, family, or counselor. Depending on their situation they can call, text, or video chat with someone they trust at any given time.
Upon opening the app you are given the choice to select your symptom, who you want to talk with, and how you would like to communicate with them. You can choose between talk, text or video chat.
There would even be the ability have the person you're talking with help you with other grounding techniques within the app. Giving the user an extra layer or conformation when their symptoms are most pronounced.
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Mic Check
Often when someone diagnosed with Schizophrenia is having auditory hallucinations, they simply need to have someone or something, to validate what they are hearing is or is not really there.
I came up with a simple solution to allow the user to use the microphone in their smart phone to check if what they are hearing is real. When they speak the sound waves spike to let them know the sounds are real. If there are no spikes there are no sounds/voices.
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Music
Sometimes the best remedy is a song that they know by heart. Lyrics and beats that they know are real and they know exactly how it is supposed to sound.
I created a simple space for them to house all their music apps and playlists so that they could access them any time anywhere without having to search for anything.
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This particular project is still in progress since the Schizophrenic community is very hard to interview and requires authorization by their councilors. Having a councilor present whenever there is an interview or any kind of user testing is simply part of the protocol. While this is a slow process I hope to illustrate how many opportunities that we as designers have to change peoples lives for the better. This was made after two rounds of interviews and one round of user testing. While simple in its nature there are no other apps that address this problem. The ability to take a little time and change the way a person lives, for the better, is part of what drives me as a designer.