CASE STUDY

emPower

Pilot program with MD Anderson Cooper for 30 breast cancer patients to help improve care between visits. This nine-month behavioral health study used the Apple Watch to capture their every move throughout treatment.

Challenge

Bring traditional behavioral health methods into the digital age.

Polaris Health knew they wanted to utilize wearables to track and communicate with patients. Before the Apple Watch had been officially released Polaris had already made a deal with MD Anderson to pilot a program with Breast cancer patients as they underwent treatment.

MY ROLE:
Lead Designer

Discovery

We talked to Clinicians and subject matter experts who were deep in the mental health space. We heard that patients generally get fantastic care for their primary medical condition, but in-between treatments and follow-ups is where patients are at risk of falling through the cracks. Mental and physical setbacks can go undetected. Patients can be on their own dealing with significant life changes for weeks or even months. In order to treat patients more holistically, doctors need better monitoring and communication with their patients.

Intake

Patients volunteered to be part of a nine-month behavioral health study using an iPhone & Apple watch to capture their progress throughout treatment.

Clinician

Doctors would have access to patients daily updates. One major benefit would be the ability to react to concerns quickly.

Opportunity

Use technology (specifically mobile and wearables) to track patients well-being over time. Allow Clinicians to monitor their patients and intervene as needed. Additionally, with more data comes the chance to find correlations between patient activities and well-being. This will help give patients the real insights to help improve their overall health.

MVP

Apple Watch

We started this project before the first Apple Watch was officially released. We began by taking a deep dive into Apples Human Interface Guide (HIG) and scouring any preview documentation to understand design constraints and best practices.

While wearables are extremely powerful, the way users engage with them is very different than more traditional devices. Knowing this, we focused our Watch app to small interactions, notifications, and tracking passive data.

iPhone

The phone served as the hub for the patient experience. In addition to recording all interactions from the Apple Watch app, it also allowed for direct input. With the larger form factor we were able to build in an important repository of resources and a more in depth way to track progress.

CLININCIAN DASHBOARD

We worked with Product Owners and Clinicians to create a hub to access patient data. Doctors found it valuable to see a broad view of their patients well-being as well as quick access to specific patients.

Results

The emPower project was the first real-world test for Polaris in extending behavioral health monitoring outside of the Dr’s office. By all accounts it was considered a huge success and a monumental first step for Polaris.