Proteus discover

My role: Senior Interaction Designer

The Idea

Proteus Discover introduces the revolutionary idea of Digital Health. Discover provides patients with meaningful health information to help manage their condition, and provides physicians with unprecedented insight into patient medication-taking and daily health habits.

Put more simply, Discover tracks the ingestion of digital medicine and collects other biometric data, which the patient reviews via mobile app, and which is shared with the patient's physician. It does this via an ingestible sensor encapsulated into medicine,which is detected by a patch worn on the patient's body, which sends data to a mobile device via Bluetooth, which then uploads the data to a secure physicians portal.

 

The Challenges

Non-Technical User Base

Discover's user base includes the elderly and infirm, who tend to be less comfortable with new technology. To confirm that we were meeting the needs of these users, we designed an interface that valued simplicity over speed, using larger tap targets and straightforward wording to communicate data requests and display complex data.

Complex Onboarding

To begin use of Discover, the user must register and provide a range of private health information, and then pair the patch with the mobile device for the first time. Just the thought of this can be daunting to an elderly patient.

To make this process smooth and easy even for the most technically challenged, we divided the registration flow onto multiple screens each requesting an easily-recalled piece of data, greatly reducing the cognitive load.

Complex Data Presented Simply

Discover collects a large amount of data regarding medication adherence, and seeks to use that data to affect the behaviors of patients. To succeed in this task, we researched the kind of information that was valuable to patients, and presented it in simple, actionable formats, allowing for deeper discovery of details for users looking for more.

FDA Approval

Ultimately, Discover is submitted for approval to the FDA, where it must meet stringent Human Factors Engineering requirements.

 

Usability Testing

To ensure we were meeting these narrow sets of requirements, we conducted a series of usability studies. These high-fidelity sessions ran target users through a set of tasks designed to test the efficacy of our solution. Through these studies, we were able to iterate Discover into an application that patients and physicians find highly usable.