Empathy

This step is to interview the patients and some physicians as we did in the part 1 section. Before we did the interview, we try to break our projects and purposes in a more direct way for people to catch our ideas. A good interview experience makes us know better of what we are going to create, and the room we are going to break.

The core idea of empathy is to ask to observe, to get immersed in the scenarios. By doing that, we walked into the hospital, approached the patients. The interview was basically started with a brief introduction of ourselves, and then we tried to ask them what the biggest unpleasantness they happened to face during the admission, and what they thought of what we can improve. The interview consequences are recorded if possible, and we certainly took notes and used as many figures, sketches as possible.

The patients we are trying to approach can be generally divided into two parts, first, random patient in the hospital, and second, patients from department of neurology and department of rheumatology. As human-centered designer, we try our best to understand our patients more. We firmly believe the more we know about our customers, the closer our projects can be applied into actuality, and uncover the unknown needs of them.

Define

In the part of define, the main idea is sought to summarize the interview results, and try to refine the interviewing results. For instance, patient may say, I felt bad since many neurological diseases requiring repetitive admissions are hereditary, and the progression of diseases is usually unstoppable. Those patients had to take several shots (medical injections) every other time, and increased the admission. On the other case, the patients complained of adverse effects resulted from the long-term medications. We can summarize their needs by saying- they need more positive, long-term, sustainable treatments. Further, based on the interviews, we tried to ask “what”, “why”, and “how” as we tried to gain the insights of their needs. For example, during the interview, patients kept complaining of the slow and tedious authorities, and small spaces of the wards. We gained the insights that time and comfort were the main concerns of our patients. After summarizing the interview into “needs” and “insights”, we now established a database of our own. And based on this we can further ideate and create the solutions.

Research

As a medicine-based iGEM team, we tried to condense our projects into different branches: neuroscience, and immunology. As based our survey and pearl experience from the doctors, many results in these fields remained unclear and required more studies and novelties to breakthrough. We come out of three separate projects in the beginning: metabolic modulation peptide, anti-cancer peptide, and neuro-degenerative peptide. From then, we broke into different teams to do some surveys of these fields, and collected as many possible solutions as possible.

Ideation

Prototyping