Liv
Project Goal:
Produce concepts that improve medication compliance by patients discharged from the hospital and eliminate the now manual telephone follow-up.
This was a fourteen week, Masters of Product Development capstone project sponsored by McKesson. It was a group effort with Rob Mislavsky, Fransisco Veiga, Srinivas Somasundaram, Tomas Melis and myself. I was responsible for the research and industrial design.
The Problem:
It is estimated that medication noncompliance costs the global economy more than $500 billion each year. Specifically, pharmaceutical companies lose approximately $190 billion and hospitals lose $100 billion per year due to patients who do not take their medications as prescribed. These costs are likely to increase in the near future because of provisions in the Affordable Care Act of 2010, which are due to cut Medicare funding to hospitals with high readmission rates by as much as 3% by 2014. After reviewing social, economic, and technological factors that may impact product development and examining a variety of product opportunity gaps that currently exist in the market, our team decided to focus specifically on intentional medication noncompliance, which is defined as a conscious avoidance of medication rather than simple forgetfulness.
Download the full documentation here.
Executive Summary
Our research ultimately led to the creation of the LIV Medication Compliance and Follow-Up System. LIV consists of three separate components that combine to form a product that simplifies the medication taking process, educates patients about the purposes of their prescriptions, incentivizes them to remain compliant, transmits compliance information to doctors and provides useful aggregate analytics, and facilitates communication between patients and caregivers. The three components of the LIV system are:
LIV Home – A compact base station containing seven detachable LIV Pods, which can hold as many as eight average-sized pills. LIV Pods can be taken on the go so patients’ medications go where they do. LIV Home monitors when LIV Pods are removed and transmits this information to doctors to confirm a patient’s medication compliance.
LIV Mobile – A smartphone application designed to educate and incentivize patients. LIV Mobile contains clear yet detailed information about a patient’s medication regimen and can be configured to set medication reminders. The app also serves as a way for patients to communicate with doctors or nurses should any problems arise with their prescriptions. Finally, LIV Mobile is the main portal to the LIV Rewards system. As patients remain compliant with their medication regimens, they earn points that can be redeemed for rewards such as Amazon gift cards.
LIV Pro – A hospital-facing, cloud-based web application that provides doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators with information that helps them optimize their prescription regimens, monitor medication compliance, and communicate directly with patients.
We explored many ways to enable patients to bring their medication with them. We wanted to create a 'smart' system that would have several check systems to insure that the patient was taking their medication with them and that they were actually ingesting the medication.
To validate out summations about medication non compliance, we provided patients(testers) with our web app or Liv Mobile and medication(Altoids) and had them follow the pseudo regimen. From this study we determined that there are 3 major factors that can contribute to a person not take thing their medication:
If the patient felt fine then they were more likely to skip a dose.
If we reminded the patient to take their medication each and every time, they became less engaged over time and eventually stopped using Liv Mobile.
Other push notifications like daily facts about their medication and daily motivators were ill received and resulted in skipped doses.
With these we built our user flow and wireframes which focused on incentivizing the users with a rewards program and a 'hand off' feel where we would limit patient notifications.
Not all medications are are intended to be taken daily. To insure that users were receiving the right medications on the right day we needed a way to secure the remaining pods and release to appropriate one on the right day. To do this we utilized electromagnets to secure the pods to the Liv Home except for the appropriate pod. In the event that the user tried to take the wrong pod, not only would they sense a tactile response, but Liv Him can sense the change in magnetism and flash. Indicating to the user that they were attempting to remove the wrong pod.
By changing the polarity of the electromagnets we can control the pod's lids, we can hold them closed or open them. Furthermore the LEDs signal to the user to take specific pods or fill them as needed.
We explored different interactions like illuminating one of the pods and controlling the electromagnet so the user could feel tactile feedback while they moved the pods. We also explored different light combination to insure that they users where filling the right pods with the right medications. This prototype was made from laser cut MDF and an Arduino to control the LEDs and electromagnets.
Above the prototype that we developed. The blue LED is signaling to the user to take that pod.