Designed an app that provides personalized hearing test results and educational material to sustain motivation in hearing health amongst middle-aged people in Finland.
Contract with Otos Health, mediated by Aalto University's Information Technology Programme
3 months (June - Aug, 2024)
Juho Karkinen, Noora Ferm, Erik
Otos Health is a Finnish R2B business that makes hearing health easier to conduct at clinics with automated software and hardware. Through their service, they aim to reduce the number of undiagnosed patients who would have benefited from hearing care more if they had been tested earlier. To raise awareness of hearing health, they asked our team to design a patient engagement portal with educational material.
People do not address their hearing problems early enough, due to a lack of sustained motivation.
Leaky pipe-line problem in the hearing care system
The queues for treatment are already so long that they would not be able to handle a large influx of new people interested in getting hearing treatment. The solution also should take into account how the app could help health practitioners in hearing health and make their jobs more efficient.
Outcome
A Hero's Journey
Highlighting how OmaOtos, a patient engagement app, would help users sustain motivation in taking care of their hearing by better understanding their diagnosis and destigmatizing hearing issues.
Impact
100% of user testers better explained their hearing test results
Compared to the original screening results handed out by Otos Health, 7/7 user testers were able to explain their results on their own without assistance from a healthcare professional.
High interest in implementing OmaOtos in the future
"The focus on reducing stigma and integrating into existing healthcare systems is a solid direction. OmaOtos is definitely something we can rally around and refine further" - Otos Health Representative
That's all I can show for now…
but here are my main takeaways from the project 👇
Central Learnings
1
Question assumptions, always.
Sometimes, you need to rip the brief and any other assumptions apart to reach the root of the problem. This helped our team reframe the problem in a way that was more accurate for our user group.
2
It's not just one problem.
We uncovered two main problems in this project, in which bettering one worsened the other. The solution could only work if it tackled both challenges at the same time. Getting the bigger picture and understanding relationships between problems is crucial for a effective solution.
3
Manage expectations.
Our final deliverables did not exactly align with the brief that was given to us in the beginning. However, our clients were still happy because we communicated our rationale behind our design choices throughout the project.
