eWALL main user scenario.
Role
UX Researcher & Designer
Year(s)
2012-2016
Duties
User Requirements Analysis
User Evaluation
Interaction Design
Project scope
eWALL for Active Long Living was a EU-funded research project with a consortium of 13 european partners including universities, research institutes and companies, coordinated by Aalborg University and completed in 2016. The project aimed to create a Smart Home platform offering health monitoring and recommendations based on sensor data, for three types of users: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) patients, patients suffering from mild cognitive impairments (MCI) and older adults with mild age-related impairments.
I was initially responsible as a User Researcher for User Requirements Analysis and iterative prototype evaluations across four european countries (Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark). By my own initiative and by circumstances, my tasks extended beyond user research, into interaction design and project management. The project offered space for experimentation and I was lucky to be joined by the Roessings R&D colleagues in this opportunity.
eWALL setup.
User Needs and shaping eWALL
In the beginning of the project, I realised that the resources planned for User Experience Design were insufficient and I had to convince the consortium by providing a detailed UX plan with time estimations. Claiming space for UX was a bold move in the beginning which was met with enthusiasm in AIT and Roessingh R&D and empowered me to step into a leading UX role on the project.
For the User Requirements Analysis, I set to explore top-notch industrial and research projects providing a 'home assistant' for older frail adults. I categorised the State-of-the-Art practices in the following domains: physical training (especially COPD); cognitive training; in-home monitoring and home automation.
After studying the technology, I focused on the pathology. YouTube and social media featured plenty of COPD and MCI stories that gave me insights on the patients' and caregivers' daily routines and struggles. This laid the ground to conduct interviews with users and caregivers. After the interviews, in collaboration with the Roessingh Research and Development Institute, we delivered a set of ten validated personas of primary users and caregivers. The key insight from the studies was that there is a common mechanism among the primary users: Whether they suffer from a physical or cognitive impairment, they tend to lose trust in their abilities and thus, gradually abandon their former activities. As a result, their confidence is affected and they often succumb in isolation. Moreover, rehabilitation therapies have a specific timeframe; even if they are effective, patients often lack the motivation to continue the training on their own.
The next natural step for me was interaction design and alignment with the technical partners. In order to shape the product, we needed to build a common understanding on several topics, e.g. which user behaviours were going to be monitored for better diagnosis and prevention. For example, coughing for COPD and waking up during the night for MCI patients were signs that could indicate exacerbation and needed thus to be monitored. After the analysis of the user research and alignment with consortium, I created a series of interaction design sketches indicating possible design directions.
As the partners were each focused on their own technical part and not on the big picture, my low-fidelity sketches managed to draw the attention to the bigger picture and encouraged discussions around it. In this project, it became apparent to me that visual prototyping was very effective as an engagement and communication tool for teams and it motivated me to later start a series of information design workshops for academic and industrial researchers in Vienna.
Interaction Design
The technical partners got to work and we applied scrum method along with some Waterfall. Early on, we defined milestones for the first and the second year prototypes. From the feedback we gathered from early user testing, I proposed a prioritization of features and applications that was adapted by the partners. In addition to my UI and User Research work, I had the idea for a new feature, the Well Being Ads, which was highly regarded and also adopted in the commercial version of eWALL.
The Well Being Ads were images portraying healthy habits that appeared on the eWALL screen and aimed to promote the well being of the users. The ads are selected based on user's activities or lack thereof as monitored by the sensors and address a variety of activities such as: water drinking, healthy eating, showering, cognitive training, going outside, meeting with friends/family, opening the window to improve air quality, etc. We later ran separate small scale evaluations to fine-tune various parameters for them, such as duration, graphic style, wording and user acceptance.
Moreover, I closely collaborated with my colleagues at RRD in the design of the eWALL notification system. We needed to develop a very structured approach to define what kind of feedback will be communicated to each user, the sound and communication style and how the alerts for critical situations will be like.
Evaluations
The user evaluations were planned in an agile manner and synchronised with the developers' speed of delivering features and fixing bugs.
Four countries were involved in the evaluation. Each evaluation site had a different lab setting and different laws applied in the testing of medical equipment with frail adults. As there would sometimes be technical glitches that would prevent us to run user studies, we performed a lot of expert reviews and technical evaluations in the system in order to ensure technical maturity for the following user evaluations.
Being responsible for the evaluation planning, I compiled a manual with goals and methods to be used according to the evaluation case at hand. The evaluation toolbox included the evaluation goals; the questions for the semi-structured interviews; validated questionnaires and well-established HCI methods, such as think-aloud protocol, paper prototyping testing, true intent testing, etc. The combination of methods along with the scenarios that we wanted to test were agreed at the spot. The evaluation toolbox was shared at my institute as a best practice, offering a flexible solution for drafting EU deliverables before the prototype’s exact state was known—by focusing on flexibility over fixed protocols.
A detailed description of the system, the evaluation protocol and the CE marks of the medical devices were submitted to the Ethical Committees of the countries and shared with the clinical professionals who helped in recruiting the patients. The recruitment of COPD and MCI patients and of formal caregivers presented many challenges, as the patients were often frail and uninterested and the medical personnel highly sought after.
In most evaluation sessions, we had a living room setup and asked participants to perform a set of defined tasks, fill in user experience questionnaires and answer to open questions in order to evaluate usability of the system. Overall, participants were keen on trying out eWALL. They were particularly motivated by the health and physical training applications and appreciated the well-being ads related to physical movement, yet they didn't feel comfortable with 'intimate' ads (e.g shower recommendations). Nevertheless, participants were sceptical of the 24/7 home monitoring required by eWALL. In addition, some of the healthy older participants resisted the idea of "a system designed for older people", as they did not feel old themselves.
Upon completion of the evaluation studies and of the majority of technical developments, a small-scale validation study was conducted to prepare the ground for the final, large-scale validation. The validation aimed to assess clinical factors such as overall physical and psychological performance of the patient from the use of eWALL before and after the intervention. I left the project before the validation took place, but the outcome was very promising, as commercialization of eWALL is on the way under the name cloudcare2u.
