Managing Wounds with Remote Patient Monitoring
MSD | 3M Health Care (Solventum) | 2021
Challenge
3M’s Medical Solution Division (MSD) wanted to add AI-enabled wound measurement capabilities to the existing patient-facing mobile app for their newly acquired negative pressure wound therapy technology (V.A.C.). The legacy V.A.C. team had begun an engagement with an external algorithm development team but had not considered the workflow or design of the UI and how it would incorporate with the existing app. A fellow interaction designer and I were tasked to work with the team to create a new user experience leveraging the front-facing smartphone camera along with sound and vibration feedback.
Phase One: Setting the Strategy
My teammate and I started by immersing ourselves in the world of wounds, understanding the terminology, treatments, and practitioners who supported patients in the wound healing process. As a companion app to a prescribed wound therapy that was closely monitored by a team of providers, we needed to understand what value the AI-enabled wound-tracking function could add, outside of what the patient already knew.
Through secondary research, patient, caregiver, and expert interviews (home health nurses and wound nurses) we discovered that patients and caregivers were largely under-informed about the wound healing process. Outside of looking for the obvious signs of infection, they often did not know how to monitor progress and were not aware of all of the possible complications. We learned that the only feedback they reliably received on the condition of the wound was through weekly visits - and even then they didn’t always get to see the actual data.
Another consideration for the design of the feature functionality was the location of the wound. As the AI leveraged the facial recognition technology in the front-facing (selfie) camera to get an accurate measure of depth, photos often needed to be taken blindly — a feat not easily accomplished if your wound was on your backside. My teammate and I began to explore how to embed tactile and haptic feedback, such as sound and vibration to guide users to get a good quality image.
Outcomes
Documentation of the current wound measurement process and best practices for consistency and correctness
Understanding of the challenges of patients, caregivers, and wound experts face throughout the wound healing experience
List of requirements, by user, for the wound tracking feature
Understanding of the requirements for images and the limitations of the technology and the machine learning-based algorithm needed to enable the feature
Exploration into tactile-based workarounds for suitable image capture and usability
Phase Two: Design and Testing
With our strategy set (and a tight development timeline), my teammate and I divided and conquered. I was responsible for the user stories and initial user flows and my colleague took a pass at the wireframes and UI design — leveraging the library and patterns already established.
I also worked with the development team to determine when and how we would utilize tactile and haptic feedback during the image capture process evaluating the sounds and vibration patterns for different interactions.
In a series of two-week sprints, we designed tested, and quickly iterated on the core functionality, leveraging user feedback sessions when possible.
Working with the product owner, I also led several working sessions to determine the product roadmap and feature backlog for the initial launch and one year beyond.
UAT was completed by the product owner and legacy V.A.C. marketing team and the wound measurement functionality (called ‘My Healing Tracking’) was pushed live to the existing app in Q1 of 2022.
Outcomes
Developed a library of user stories and associated user flow for launch and future releases
Designed and integrated sound and haptic feedback into the user experience to aid usability when taking photos of wounds in inconvenient locations, the first feature to do so in the 3M Health Care digital portfolio
Launched R1 of the feature into the existing My Wound Healing app in Q1 of 2022.
