Madhuka De Silva

Designing a Palliative Care Application for Cancer Patients

Concept project conducted at Cambio Software Engineering (Pvt) Ltd in Sri Lanka

Image created using WIX AI

Context

In Sri Lanka, around 23,000 cancer patients leave this world without palliative care (End of life care) each year. This was partly due to difficulties faced by Oncologists (Cancer specialists) to direct patients towards palliative care. Also, patients do not continue palliative care due to scarce resources in the main cancer hospital and problems in travelling. I thus set out to design a mobile application so it can be less pain free avoiding difficulties faced by the cancer patients and Oncologists.

Sources: http://www.health.gov.lk/moh_final/english/public/elfinder/files/publications/AHB/2017/AHS%202016.pdf

Problem

How might we help oncologists to direct terminal cancer patients to palliative care, so that patients have a less painful end of life journey because palliative care cannot wait

Design Skills and Methods

Interviewed several stakeholders
- One oncologist - to understand how they deal with terminal patients, how palliative care is provided, how their daily schedules are prioritised
- Mother of deceased daughter due to terminal cancer - to understand why they were unaware of palliative care, how they dealt with the treatments in last stages
- Two patients diagnosed with terminal cancer - to understand how they obtain their treatments and to their awareness about palliative care
Designing a protoype (Figma)
Usability testing

Insights Identified

oncologists focus less on terminal patients since it is either painful or time consuming to convey the palliative required condition and do the same task repetitively for similar type of patients. Also, they might focus on patients that has more chance of survival.
some patients are busy or do not like visiting doctor to obtain the same pain medicine all the time.
patients or guardians of patients wish to know the true situation.

Proxy User Testing and Results

System Usability Scale (SUS) mean of 77.083
Users showed interest in the gamification concept application
Users liked the personalization but can be improved further
Some users liked the personality switch of the chat bot and some did not
Need more improvement
- by reducing the feeling that user is talking to a machine and more feel like a person through changes in linguistics
- How the challenges are conveyed to the user

Reflections

One of the main challenges was interacting with cancer patients in the most humanly way possible since they are struggling with survival.
Although the user research at the beginning was performed sufficient enough, gaining feedback for the prototype was not an easy task.