This project was created as part of the 2019 “Hacking Health” Hackathon event at Shopify, and was conceptualized by the team at Bruyere Hospital.
The team is comprised of the following:
Anne Harley - Physician
Veronique French - Physician
Mohamed Al Arfa - Social Worker
Cory Maklin - Developer
Arielle Shannon - Developer
Marwan AlShafei - UX Designer
David Khazzam - Developer
Keith Newton - Patient/Lived Experience
Thanks to everyone’s efforts, we were able to win Algonquin College’s $10,000 prize, giving us support from both their faculties and students as we further develop the project.
Fractures are a common occurrence in an older adult's life. Social isolation often follows if they fail to recover completely and cannot return to their previous activities. Increasing activity would help to address seniors' risk of worsening frailty, falls, and social isolation following fractures.
Adapt the use of Fitbit hardware to measure steps in clients that are using walkers. We’ll design a novel Fitbit app that manages activity data for seniors, customized to their accessibility needs.
The app would generate motivation to seniors to increase walking and socialization using customized feedback, leaderboard displays, and group activities, all in a retirement home setting.
To design a novel Fitbit app to promote socialization after a fracture by:
1. Increasing walking distances.
2. Creating opportunities to socialize using walking data.
4 months
Figma, Whimsical
Currently available apps that manage data focus on active seniors who are cyclists, runners, or independent walkers. Accelerometers, such as Fitbits have had broad uptake in younger adults, but are not commonly used in frail seniors. Barriers to their use include low vision, declining cognitive abilities, decreased manual dexterity, and a lack of familiarity with technology.
BitbyBit seeks to solve this problem by using Fitbit’s data such as distance walked daily in a group living setting of a retirement home to motivate those recovering from a hip fracture to continue walking and increase socialization.
Since we only had 3 days to work on this project, we had to make numerous educated assumptions to get the project started, including:
- Seniors were comfortable with putting on a Fitbit
- Seniors were comfortable with having their step-count data sent to our app and displayed on a public screen.
- Seniors would pay attention to the leaderboard, and use it as motivation to socialize and find walking partners.
Despite limited time, we were able to make one qualitative interview with a senior in a retirement home that suffered from a hip fracture.
The goal of the interview was to gain insight into the lifestyle of a senior suffering from a hip fracture, and how the issue of social isolation is dealt with.
The interview revealed a number of important insights including:
- Walking after a hip fracture is very difficult, and any distance more than one block may require assistance
- There were zero concerns for privacy
- About half of the seniors the interviewee dealt with on a day to day basis were considered tech savvy from his perspective
After looking into the different ways this app could be used, we’ve discovered there were two main users: the Patient and the Health Coach.
Although a mobile version of the app may be worked on in the future, the main focus for this project will be to build a desktop version of the app.
BitbyBit is a desktop app that extracts step counts from multiple Fitbits used by participants in a retirement home. This data gets sent to BitbyBit, viewable by the health coach. The health coach then uses this data to promote socialization based on user research. Using Fitbit’s API tool, we were able to pull specific data such as daily, weekly, and monthly steps.
After completing creating a sample user flow, it was time to collaborate with the team and figure out what we can build.
Once we got the concept of what we were building more defined, I started sketching out some wireframes. I initially wanted the design to have all of its data available in one page.
However, after discussing the design with the team and understanding the capabilities of each team member, it was clear that it would be faster and easier to display certain information in a separate page instead.
It’s crucial to collaborate with developers when working on designs, especially when you have critical deadlines to hit. It would’ve been a huge waste of time if I spent hours designing the UI, only to be told it wasn’t doable given the time constraints.
Now that we’ve agreed on what our limitations and constraints are, it was time to deliver the UI.
After discussing branding with the stakeholder, we wanted patients to understand that participating with our app would be beneficial to them. The UI’s brand colour needed to represent peace and trust. After doing some research on color psychology, we decided to go with a dominant dark blue color to represent trust.
Given the time constraints, there is still much to be done in terms of research to turn this into a viable product. Before furthering development, we’ll need to spend more time talking to and shadowing users in retirement homes to get a proper feel of who we’re building this for, and the different pain points and use cases that could arise.
A big part of the role of the UX designer is to work with developers and answer foundational questions before the development process starts such as:
- What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?
- Who’s the target audience?
- What are the use cases?
- What features did you decide on? Why?
Hackathons are always tough. You never feel that you have enough time, but because we took the time early on to define the problem and empathise with our users, the direction of where to take the project became clearer. And instead of spending time figuring out where we were going, we spent our time worrying about how to get there.
