Healthier Lives through Empathy-Guided Technology Innovations

MODERN MEDICINE

HEALTHIER LIVES THROUGH EMPATHY-GUIDED TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS

At Microsoft Healthcare, many of our design team’s insights and contributions are derived from knowledge transferred from other industries and business settings along with entirely new insights and technology advancements. When I transitioned from designing consumer devices and joined the Health Futures team at Microsoft Healthcare about five years ago, my inspiration and motivation came from my desire to help people live healthier lives. From the start I have believed that we, as designers, contribute daily in unique and unexpected ways toward improving life.

Empathy, a Source of Innovation Designers can inspire game-changing solutions that have a direct impact on people’s quality of life through the various insights derived from their research and by supporting interdisciplinary team members in developing empathy for one another, product users and stakeholders. Whereas many circumstances in today’s medical industry are out of our control, designers can make tremendous impact in one particular area: empathy. When teams invest in efforts to develop empathy for their users and stakeholders, crucial project objectives and priorities become clear. As we develop that empathy, it is important to remember that the medical industry entails a rather large and complex set of entities. These entities can include patients themselves, clinicians, payors, policymakers and pharmacists. They all have unique considerations that must be taken in account as we develop a deep understanding of their objectives and their journeys and recognize important connection points. For example, we must consider how the various roles within the delivery of medical/health and well-being products impact the marketing of these products.

As designers, our mission is to bridge important communication gaps between scientists, engineers, biotechnologists, strategists, and healthcare and medical experts. For example, we learned that physicians and their clinical staff love their patients but not necessarily their computers. This is an attitude that does not resonate with technologists, and it’s difficult to sympathize with opinions different from your own. With this awareness, we must find engaging ways to provide breakthrough technologies that increase interaction with what the healthcare providers love (patients) rather than focus on what they don’t (computers).

With the medical industry’s increased focus on preventative care, designers can transfer the insights they gained from developing successful consumer products to their work with healthcare categories. However, in the complex world of healthcare, designers cannot rely on their own research and experience-based conclusions. They must heavily lean on expert medical knowledge and input throughout the design development process. Only strong relationships with healthcare professionals will enable us to sufficiently empathize with their objectives, challenges, mitigations and emotions. From here, those gathered insights must be digestible for technologists and developers as they explore new solutions. As in other industries, designers must also remain vigilant in recognizing those who are excluded by our design proposals and provide solutions that reach a broader range of users and are more reflective of our diverse world.

Future Advancements via Technology Two major technology areas are primed to change the healthcare industry: artificial intelligence and augmented reality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer program to think and learn. As new algorithms are developed that allow insightful information to be derived from massive amounts of data, numerous applications will arise, including ambient AI, remote patient monitoring via the internet of medical things (IoMT), precision medicine and health analytics.

The majority of primary care doctors struggle with today’s electronic healthcare records. Information is incomplete and, at times, too difficult to locate. Finding

Today, patients struggle with complex and seemingly complex information in order to manage their health conditions.

information and generating new documentation is time consuming and takes away valuable one-on-one time that could be spent interacting with the patient. With the help of AI, much of the note taking can be performed by the computer. This allows doctors to focus more on their patients. After each patient visit, AI can assist with finalizing the documentation in the electronic healthcare records. This is an exciting and new playground for designers. As AI is integrated into the daily workflows of clinical staff and peripheral user groups, their physical surroundings as well as their devices’ functionalities and interactions will change. Designers must plan for interaction paradigms and entirely new and tailored form factors that support interaction flows (hardware and software) that might otherwise be confusing and ambiguous. AI-enabled precision medicine and population health analytics are becoming a reality.

The future of personalized connected devices in healthcare is limitless. Imagine that medical devices could empower and support patients to improve their conditions with less active involvement of their doctors and caregivers! We have the ability to design less intrusive devices that increase efficiency in the interactions between patients and providers, ultimately encouraging patients to remain active physically and socially. The designing of personalized devices (software and hardware) will enable people to tailor their device support system to fit their individual cognitive and physical abilities.

Several pioneers have already started to explore this via a new closed-loop device systems for diabetics. A self-adjusting device loop (insulin pump connected to the patient’s skin patch) regulates the patient’s insulin intake at

a much more refined level and provides an array of additional advantages over today’s traditional methods. The device’s AI assists in the recognition of patterns in the context of behaviors and events over time; thus, it can directly encourage the patient on how to improve those patterns to better control their blood sugar. In this example, the clinical staff will have a custom view of the patient’s cloudconnected data and will only have to jump in to provide ad hoc guidance, allowing patients to improve their health without interruption.

Augmented reality (AR) provides an interactive experience in which real-world objects and environments are enhanced by computer-generated information. This information can be in the form of visuals, sound, haptics and even olfactory sensory modalities.

With AR, clinicians will be able to view organs from various angles, different scales and graphic augmentations in ways never before possible. Without compromising their focus on primary tasks, surgeons will communicate with on-site and remote team members. They will be able to switch between multiple screens projected into their headset instead of having to look away to view monitors mounted around them on the walls of the operating room.

Imagine the impact AI can have when combined with telesurgery! It will enable surgeons to collaborate with remote colleagues in real time. Many surgical procedures can be performed less invasively in ambulant settings. Once AR and virtually reality technologies have improved processing power, streamlined costs and improved interaction experiences, they will drastically change the industry. Applications used to train medical students or

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MODERN MEDICINE

In the future, patients should benefit from a customized patient-centric information flow.

to co-design future operating rooms are inspiring the first examples. In the area of physical rehabilitation, AR will have highly enhanced and customized environments that respond to each patient’s capability level. Therapists will be able to incrementally raise the difficulty level and motivate patients without overwhelming them.

Very soon, designers will have opportunities to explore hardware, hardware interactions, multifaceted software interactions and services for a wide range of demands. Solutions will span from rather broad to specialized use cases and objectives, such as a light weight, size reductions and cleanability, and will have evolved to support unobtrusive, mistake-proof interactions and applications.

The Design Discipline Is Evolving In the future when looking back on the breakthrough innovations in AI and AR, the design icons that will have defined this technology will be the ones that integrated hardware and software and created delightfully humancentric products. To me, industrial design is no longer only about the creation of mass-produced hardware. We must expand our design thinking as it has been embraced by designers since the Bauhaus 100 years ago and learn more about the inner intelligence held within each product. Our responsibility for good design must expand from physical ergonomics to optimizing cognitive loads and workflows. And we must expand our focus from single products to interconnected products and the transfer and communication of information. Without compromising ergonomic comfort and safe device usability, we must find ways to invoke trust and motivate users to engage.

In addition to maximizing our empathy for our users and stakeholders and leaning on our relationships with specialists in the various fields, we must skillfully balance our vision for the future of healthcare with reality. Without losing sight of the huge potential impact new technologies can have, we need to creatively support the current and future clinical workforce for their individual skills, capabilities and work environments. We need to be careful not to break established workflows in the consideration of safety as we propose new devices and work environments. We need to skillfully integrate with existing constraints such as architecture and/or device interdependencies.

In conclusion, innovative devices can widen the types of data and tools available. AI and AR can enable users to consume contextually relevant information. User-friendly system experiences can transform disjointed services into more impactful services that can expand from hospitals and doctors’ offices to remote patients and users. Whenever we are in tune with our users and collaborators, we can teach each other and learn from each other. Ultimately, we can introduce solutions that will help create a healthier future. This is my design dream.

—Moni Wolf, IDSA moniwolf@microsoft.com

Moni is a principal design director for Microsoft Healthcare. She combines her core strength in design with software development, medical science and engineering to deliver holistic product experiences.