1. Concept Proposal
As mentioned in the W01P15 Domain Research, everyone is supposed to have the same right to receive healthcare according to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are various causes that could affect the healthcare quality. Some of them are traveling distance, rural culture, lack of health accommodation and limited resources where they lead to the poor quality of health care in rural or remote areas. Our team believes that rural areas should have the same quality as urban people have in terms of the healthcare. In this project, our team will identify the domain space profoundly by conducting research and doing the design process with an outcome of the interactive prototype by the end of project.
Based on the paper by Buzza that talked about barriers in rural healthcare (Buzza, 2011), veterans in rural areas have lower health-related quality of life compared to the urban veterans. The causes that establish these issues are likely to be a multi-factorial such as traveling distance, lack of quality healthcare, limited services, rural culture, and others. There is no single best effective solution to solve all the issues. Lack of government care for the rural veterans also affect majorly the quality of the healthcare. According to the literature paper by Buzza, traveling distance was found to be the strongest cause of the general health care issues in rural areas. From statistics conducted, rural veterans are found to drive further away to have the care. This issue has become a burden to rural veterans which causes them to avoid the healthcare facility. There are several technologies that already exist and could be applied in order to solve the issues of rural health care, for example, telemedicine where it remotely provides health care which has solved the traveling distance problem. However, some of the technologies are not adequate enough to be applied due to limited technology resources in rural areas. Moreover, to apply such system, it requires an abundance amount of prerequisites (Papali, 2016) such as the human resource for task-shifting, costs for proper training and cooperation between all levels of the health system. The abundance has made these technologies ineffective to use for daily use of healthcare in rural areas. In consideration of the factor that there is no single solution that could solve all the problems regarding the healthcare in rural areas, our team will try to solve the limitation of the connectivity between people in rural areas and doctors in urban areas.
Based on the conclusion in the paper by Goodyear-Smith and Janes (Goodyear & Janes, 2008) that talked about rural primary health care workforce in New Zealand, our team agreed and also analyzed that there is need to encourage the system to support long-term rural rotations. The paper also stated based on their research that doctors with rural backgrounds tend to stay and work in rural areas too. Based on this fact, one possible solution to increase the number of the medical healthcare team in rural areas is by exposing trainee doctors to an internship opportunities in the rural healthcare and chances to be a part of the community in term of contributing to the healthcare team. Nonetheless, the solution also brings to another problem where rural careers also have to provide a good lifestyle in order to attract people to choose rural over urban careers. This problem will be difficult to overcome because it involves other aspects that affect the outcome. One example is the imbalance of political economy between urban and rural development (Edwards, 1976). As a result of the deadlock caused between the solution and the new issues, our team decided to focus to generate the optimal platform where it primarily tries to overcome the insufficient amount of health support in rural areas specifically the connectivity issue between people in rural areas and doctors/medical support in urban areas.
As there are limitations of health care in rural areas mentioned above, the solution offered by Goodyear-Smith and Janes paper could be a possible solution to support the health care in rural areas. The solution is to continue improving the healthcare quality through more exposure to rural training and life opportunities there. Our team is interested in working to try to connect people within the doctor’s community where the platform will also try to expose the community to have a chance of contributing to rural areas. Literature suggested having a panel where it could offer people chances to contribute to their specific specialty in the medical world in rural areas. Where most of the solution nowadays are technical, the infrastructure of the medical community is another side that could support the quality of the healthcare. Aside from that, by having a good connectivity of healthcare communities, it also improves the responsiveness and accessibility of the health services to rural veterans. For example, if the rural area needs external dental support because they have limited resource of it, the healthcare community of the rural area could post the opportunity and discuss the solution to overcome the dental issues. If there are any trainee doctor or senior doctor with the dental specialty that wants to involve, they could contact the rural health care community in order to contribute more to the certain dental issue. This platform is to target to build a community where it encourages people to devote their energy, money, time, or any aspect to advance the rural healthcare.
As our domain is healthcare for rural communities, it is connected with the domain research that is conducted by Louis Christopher and Yiwei Guo Pair Domain Research (W01P15). The insights that are gathered are based on literature that was mentioned in the domain research. There are several insights of the healthcare that are considered to be the foundation of our group project, such as:
- Ineffective existing technology system that is supposed to improve health care in rural areas because of limitations. The limitations include the limited technology resource and insufficient cost of the human resource. (Papali, 2016)
- Scaled up and collaborative approach might improve the quality of health care in rural and remote areas. (Papali, 2016)
- Travel distance was found to be the main cause of the overall problem of health care in rural areas issues. Rural veteran tends to travel further than an urban veteran to have the same quality of healthcare. (Buzza, 2011)
- Action is needed to increase the number of medical teams to choose rural careers. (Edwards, 1976)
- Exposure to rural training and living is not delineated over the community and has been decreasing throughout the year because of the trend to have a good lifestyle in urban areas. (Edwards, 1976)
From the healthcare insights that are based on several works of literature gathered, our team has decided to generate a platform where it could create one community as the main platform where doctors or other medical community could meet and acted as a platform to expose to the opportunity in contributing to work in healthcare, specifically in rural areas. In short, our group will create a healthcare network platform, especially for rural areas. Our aim is to bring two ends of the users together, the users being urban doctors/medical team and the other user is the healthcare community in rural areas. As mentioned above, our team want to increase the chance of people having a career in rural areas which could also increase the career opportunities in the rural area. Hence, our platform will expose the urban community to any possibilities to contribute on improving the quality of health care in rural areas. The platform will also support social interaction where people could share their experience of their contribution to the community. This includes various medical treatments, rare illness symptoms, eating habits, nutrition consumption and such. Through this platform, rural veterans don't have to travel far to get the care that they need. The community will help rural area by the volunteer works offered or any other solution offered on the platform to decrease the chance of far traveling.
Various other features also will be offered to support the main target, such as sharing the existing experience from contributing in the healthcare rural areas. The platform content is collaborative efforts from each users/parties. For example, if a trainee doctor has contributed in one rural area, he/she could share the experience in a format of a post where people could see globally. The intention of this feature is to attract others to have the same positive experience as he/she has accomplished of supporting rural healthcare. The additional micro-features that will be applied have to be iterated or may need to be changed in the future as the idea is built upon researches but not yet be tested to real life users. From the feedback we will receive along the stages of development, we can able to even come up with a better solution or better version of our solution.
There are several healthcare network applications that already exist and bring together the doctors inside the community. The most popular platforms used are Sermo (http://www.sermo.com/) and DailyRounds (https://www.dailyrounds.org/). Sermo is one of the global platforms and it already brings over 800,000 users where verified physicians around the world are connected. Dailyrounds also acts as the international community that provides a chat platform and a place to share experience, medical cases, etc. However, most of the platforms that already exist have goals to improve the knowledge of each registered individual in the community. For example, Dailyrounds is a platform to share any new guidelines or journal that worldwide doctors found throughout the year. Our platform is different, our team will create a platform that is focused on connecting urban medical communities (doctors, nurses, etc) with the rural health care community. As the only platform now to do our goal is by researching throughout the medical social media or contacting medical communities, our platform will make the process easier by being the platform that helps to bridge the connectivity gap. There is an existing platform that provides a chance for rural healthcare career but there is not yet an independent platform that brings both communities together and contributes helping the rural health care issues.
There are two target audience for this application, medical people and existing rural health care community. The sole reason we targeted these two audiences is that we concern the civilian in a rural area might not have enough knowledge to access the platform. The existing rural healthcare community will act as the party that might need the help of the external resources from the urban medical people. The medical people will act as the side that willingly search and contribute to the opportunities of helping the issues that are posted from the existing rural health care community. Normally most of the doctors in rural areas are on rotation as volunteers and lives there for a short period such as three months, but due to this, they might not have the latest updates of medical reports. Our goal in this platform is also to help solving this issue as well. As the target users are diverse all over the world, this implies that the project is not limited to only one geographical audience. To be more efficient, the platform could indicate to specific geographic user case but it would need more research that would be conducted in the future. The plan is described in the Plan of Work section. Although there are papers that mention the high possibilities to have trainee doctors to participate in rural areas, our team has decided to expose the possibilities to any age group of healthcare medical community. This decision is based on the fact that our group wants to improve the healthcare generally, not only based on quantitative, but also the quality. Having the opportunity to have senior doctors to contribute to helping the healthcare will also increase the quality of the rural healthcare.
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Persona 1
Max is in his late 40s. He is a senior doctor who works in the hospital near his home in Brisbane. He acted as a general surgeon in the hospital. He has been working in the hospital since his 30s. He wants to have a new experience, help people and he is willing to let his new income be less than the normal income.
Goals: Help people that have difficulties in gaining the same quality of care
Frustrations: Do not have any connections that could connect him to the goals. Do not want to spend his time in the internet too much exploring more medical communities to get the connection. -
Persona 2
Tim is in his late 50s and he has been a leader for the rural health care community. He has been managing the rural area's healthcare. However, he found out that it has low quality in term of maternity. He hopes to have an external resource that could either work there or maybe teach people in the healthcare to get a better quality in term of maternity.
Goals: Have the same rights and quality for rural areas community in term of healthcare
Frustrations: Does not have any bigger media that could expose the rural opportunities to the world. Don't have enough money to provide the same lifestyle as urban to a paid doctor.
- Be the intermediate of rural and urban medical community
- Gap the connectivity distance between urban and rural healthcare
- Increase the quality of rural healthcare
- Improve the support system of rural healthcare
- Allow and encourage people to contribute and volunteer
- Allow people to share their contribution experience
- Create persuasive interfaces as the platform for this project
- Represent social and mobile factor on the platform
Below is the illustrated main flow that our team wants to achieve in order to complete the listed goals above.
The context of social and mobile computing is that the platform will interconnect users on the move and have interaction based on the location.
The possible technology our team could apply to the project is persuasive technology where it aims to change people's attitude or behavior through social influence. Our team finds that motivation and trigger aspect from persuasive technology is very important to increase user engagement in the platform. This is based on our research of persuasive technology behavior model (Fogg, 2009). Three parts from the motivation aspect including sensation, anticipation, and belonging are affecting the outcome of the desired behavior from the project’s goals. More research would be needed to get the best marketing content for our platform to support the motivation aspect of the persuasive technology. Another aspect of persuasive technology is the ability. The ability of our platform will also rely on the power of simplicity which mentioned in the paper as the main power from persuasive experience. This includes an individual’s money, time, effort, social deviance, brain cycles, etc. The last aspect of persuasive technology based on the research paper (Fogg, 2009), our team also found that a trigger is a vital aspect to the product where it would trigger the motivation behavior the individual has. Since our platform activeness relies on both parties/communities engagement with the platform, different triggers would be needed for the different situation from individuals/target users of our platforms.
How do they fit - in terms of social engagement and location specificity?
Below is a list of the theory that will guide us to achieve the optimal outcome of the project:
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Semantic & Social Relationships: Social software aims to coordinate, collaborate, and communicate through a software/display. The system outcome of this platform will combine two parties that were mentioned above in the target audience sections. Both of them are expected to have an active engagement to the platform where both parties could participate in supporting the quality of the rural healthcare. By participating, the platform will build relationships between both parties that is based on our main goal. Being part of the platform, an individual could see other needs and also the emotional effect of volunteering in the rural community. The content that is in the platform is created by both parties combining their needs. The content could be divided into each medical topic based. Specific topics would be picked later after our team has done research into more narrowed areas in both medical areas and rural areas.
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Location-based: The mobile software is the technology that travels with individuals. The platform also will support the location awareness where people could share their positive contribution experience in certain rural healthcare. For example, an individual could post their day-to-day life experience in contributing of dental services in Birdsville. By having this location awareness, people could discover new things just like our team discover Birdsville existence. Our team sees the location issue as a very important issue because people are not exposed on the internet to the rural information intensively and specifically about the healthcare. The platform space is healthcare which is based on our domain space. Thus, the content inside the platform would be the places of the healthcare space, such as Birdsville Healthcare.
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| Week | Phase | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | Initial Requirement and Design |
- Research the areas of healthcare system - Brainstorm ideas |
| 7 | Initial Requirement and Design |
- Research more narrowed area of healthcare system - Interview real users that has adequate knowledge of healthcare system - Brainstorm and Evaluate the ideas |
| 8 | Initial Requirement and Design |
- Start making sketches and low fidelity mockups - Seek out real user for testing - Have the requirement for technology that want to be applied |
| 9 | Prototype and Evaluation |
- User Testing - Start making the high fidelity mockup - Initiate the interactive prototype framework |
| 10 | Prototype and Evaluation |
- Analyse the feedback and testing results - Re-iterate fidelity mockup - Exploring the interactive prototype environment |
| 11 | Iteration and Evaluation | Design Sprints, including Reflect, Ideate, Prototype, Testing, Implement. |
| 12 | Iteration and Evaluation | Design Sprints, including Reflect, Ideate, Prototype, Testing, Implement. |
| 13 | Final Prototype |
- Latest implementation sprint for interactive prototype - Create documentation |
- Initial Requirements and Design
By week 8, our team will conduct more narrowed research and interviews to people that have more knowledge regarding the healthcare system in rural areas in order to answer several questions to asked, like how the rural health care system works, what is the real issues in the rural health care, what motivations that could drive urban people to volunteer in supporting rural health care, how to apply persuasive technology in our platform, etc. Our team also will look at many user cases in more narrowed medical areas and rural areas. These user cases are discovered in order for our team to know the real need and pain points from the rural health care itself. The personas described above could discover more deeply in this stage as we discover (or narrow) a wide range of target users. The research that will be conducted will be focused on qualitative insights where we expect to gain more insights on what the issues are and the likely possible solutions that we could create to overcome the issues. Our team will generate a complete low fidelity or rough sketch of our project’s mock-up including the project flow. By having low fidelity / rough sketch, our team will be able to decide on specific requirement and features of the platform. The wireframes developed at this stage are not final and there will definitely be iterations based on the user testing that will be conducted after week 8. By achieving this milestone, it also gives our team possibilities to discover and observe a wide range of technologies genres.
- Prototype and Evaluation
By week 10, our team intends to conduct the testing mentioned above and iterate the prototype based on the results of the testing. The testing to be used to test this mock-up are moderated usability testing and A/B testing. Our team chose moderated usability testing (or called as Guerrilla testing) to know exactly how our the users behave on our product. Like mentioned above, persuasive design have goals to see if the platform could change the person’s behavior. Our team would like to test if our discoveries from research have improved our platform as persuasive technology. After the Guerilla testing, we also would like to know the user’s feedback by asking several questions. The questions that are asked need to be not biased and clear in order to gain the personal point of view. Our team also chose A/B Testing because we would like to know user’s preference over our mockup/product flow if we gave them more than one option of the product flow or wireframes. The testing types could be added in the later stage of design development as we would discover the development issue throughout the process. We would also apply the high fidelity mock-up in order to get better visual which improve usability testing where the participants are likely to behave naturally as if they interacting with the normal product. At this stage, our team also will start to initiate the interactive prototype based on the technology discovery on the last milestone, for example, to initiate and learn the framework of the website platform or mobile platform, etc.
- Iteration and Evaluation
By week 11 & 12, our team will already have the user testing results from the previous week. Both mock-ups and the interactive prototype will be iterated based on the user testing feedback and results. Our team intends to run the iteration twice, in week 11 and week 12. In each week, our team would apply the techniques of design sprint to improve the product because the time span to iterate is limited to one week. We could not say the exact way to do the evaluation because the evaluation will be based on the issue of the previous user testing found. The outcome from the latest iterations and evaluations in this milestone will be the final high fidelity mock-up/prototype. At this stage, we will also develop the interactive prototype in parallel to achieve the goals in week 13.
- Final Prototype
By week 13, we would have a final proof-of-concept prototype that has the ability to do certain functions that represent our project description as mentioned above. It will be adequate enough to simulate the product flow and get the user’s to understand our project goals. The final proof-of-concept prototype is the result of many iterations of mock-ups and wireframe that reflects on both the platform’s and the user’s needs. Aside from the final prototype, our team will also produce the documentation of the design process that we do for the project. The documentation will include all the design process journey and the reflection of each iteration of the product.
The project will work in an agile environment where every team members will participate based on their chosen tasks. The chosen tasks are not based on their strongest and most comfortable areas, but it is based on the person willing to participate in the area. Our group wants to improve our skills and knowledge based on the area that we chose. Below is a list of team members and their chosen task.
- Keyne Kassapa - 45114551 (Team Leader)
- Email: keynekassapa13@gmail.com
- Program: Bachelor of Information Technology
- Interest: Full Stack Development, Graphic Design
- Aspiration & Goals: To be able to understand unfamiliar new are and explore it deeply by contributing to research and the project development. I also want to improve on how to effectively bring the team to get the best outcome by having a good management process throughout the project. My hope is that our team is able to generate the best outcome from our optimal efforts for this project.
- Immanuel Lucky Ndilowe - 44241469
- Email: immanuelndilowe@gmail.com
- Program: Bachelor of Information Technology
- Interest: Graphic Designer, Front-end Developer, User Experience Designer
- Aspirations & Goals: To be able to successfully create a working product which is clean, simplified and modern. I also want to improve in working with teams as it has been a challenge for some time, this gives me the opportunity to even do better in teamwork.
- Fong Yng Dong - 45196520
- Email: yngdong.fong@uqconnect.edu.au
- Program: Bachelor of Information Technology
- Interest: Graphic Design, Back-end Database Management, Front-end Web Developer
- Aspirations & Goals: To be able to sharpen my skills on my way to become a full stack developer. Also, to improve my communication skills in a team to improve the efficiency of workflow.
- Wei Shan Liew - 44661665
- Email: tonywater73@gmail.com
- Program: Bachelor of Information Technology
- Interest: Graphic Design, Front-end & Back-end Web Developer
- Aspirations & Goals: To be able to improve my skills and gain new knowledge from team members.
GitHub : https://github.com/deco3500-2018/Pirates-of-Design
For the project progress for the semester, we will upload the various materials to Google Drive and GitHub, however, both of the storage is not able to present the same materials, for instance, Google Drive to allow us to collaboration on the project as file sharing for documentation. We also will use GitHub as prototype version control to collate our work.
Social Platform The team will use Facebook Messenger as the primary mode of communication mode for all issues and all team members are expected to respond the messages. If there are any urgent issues, a team member may be contacted through the phone.
Work Allocation Since we working in an agile environment for the project, we can create a task list in GitHub project management as a platform to keep track of progress. During every meeting is discussed, team members will update the task that needs to be accomplished. Update the task in GitHub project management allow for team members tracking the progress and visibility of everyone in which task. This will help team members to avoid working in the same task.
- Team members participated in various Hackathon
- Team members determined to give it our best in every input
- We have specific skill sets, but willingly to go out from our comfort zone and learn new knowledges from each other.
- We are patient when discussing and understanding each other’s proposed idea in different slangs as we are from different countries.
- We started our assessment in early stages to make sure everything is in place and have time to make improvement.
- Access to the previous team domain research has helped our team to have additional background information to the topic itself. The domain research from previous group is the W01P15 domain research.
- Access to the health service centre at University of Queensland. The research is about to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health service delivery. By having this advantages, our team hope to have more insights as we discover the project throughout the sprints.
- The ineffective communication issue where we mostly communicate with Facebook Messenger instead of face-to-face communication. To solve this, our team has come up with a communication agreement in the team contract.
- Due to different timetable schedules between the team, we only have limited time options to have meetings. To solve this, our team will plan the schedule ahead 3 days before the event take place.
- The knowledge based on the struggle of the rural healthcare is limited to the resource found in the internet. Our team would try to contact external researchers that have the same field in the healthcare system.
- Our team members are all from technology background and we have limited knowledge regarding the health issues. Our team will try to ask our connections if they have deep knowledge about the health environment. We would try to gain insights by asking them questions regarding the health issues in rural areas.
- To be able to improve the people’s lifestyles, especially health in rural areas considering the fact that veterans tend to have lower quality of health.
- A lot of possibilities to increase the awareness of hardship of people in rural areas among the society.
- There is not yet the technology that represents our goal, the idea could be the first idea introduced to the community.
- The project concept might not be able to convey to the rural areas as they may not have the technologies to receive it.
- Each geographic location has a different issue of rural health care, thus our solution may not effective to be applied in certain areas
- People might encourage the project to be implemented as it can help in solving the health problems in rural areas and make the world a better place.
- People might not care for the project as it is not their area of problems
- People might get bored with the platform after a while of using it. If there is no significant update that could make the user’s addicted to the platform, the user might leave the platform as soon as they find its not useful.
- People might oppose the development of the project as the health issues in rural areas might affect their comfort zones
- The project might not be very efficient as we thought but it is the first big step to help solve the health issues in rural areas. The effectiveness relies upon many aspects including geographic, money, awareness, motivation, etc. These main aspects that the project will apply will be considered by our team in a future stage of development.
- The project is reliable as it will provide various help according to the needs of the people in rural areas. Both ends need each other, thus, the platform would be the perfect intermediate for people to do the activity from.
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JANES, R. New Zealand rural primary health care workforce in 2005 Janes, R. (2008). New Zealand rural primary health care workforce in 2005. [online] onlinelibrary-wiley. Available at: https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/doi/full/10.1111/j.1440-1584.2007.00949.x [Accessed 4 Sep. 2018].
PAPAL, A. Providing health care in rural and remote areas: lessons from the international space station (Papal, 2015) Papal, A. (2015). Providing health care in rural and remote areas: lessons from the international space station. [online] who.int. Available at: http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/94/1/15-162628.pdf [Accessed 4 Sep. 2018].
FOGG, B. A Behavior Model for Persuasive Design. (Fogg, 2009) Fogg, B. (2009). A Behavior Model for Persuasive Design.. [online] mebook.se. Available at: https://www.mebook.se/images/page_file/38/Fogg%20Behavior%20Model.pdf [Accessed 5 Sep. 2018].
MYBLUE - BLUE CROSS BLUE SHIELD OF MASSACHUSETTS (MyBlue - Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, 2018) MyBlue - Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. (2018). [image] Available at: https://myblue.bluecrossma.com/sites/g/files/csphws636/files/inline-images/Doctor%20Image%20Desktop.png [Accessed 4 Sep. 2018].
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Louis,C. & Yiwei,G. Healthcare in Rural Areas Louis,C. & Yiwei,G. (2018) Healthcare in Rural Areas https://padlet-uploads.storage.googleapis.com/302648022/b55b725b3811faee9a98182919ebcbb1/W01P15DomainResearch.pdf [Accessed 4 September. 2018]