Bhargavi | Kangaru Care

Kangaru Care

Helping parents track and monitor skin-to-skin care for preterm babies

About

Kangaroo mother care is a technique of newborn care where babies are kept skin-to-skin with a parent. It is a method that has often been used as a treatment for premature or preterm babies. The aim of the project was to design a mobile application to work with a sensor-based product for parents providing Kangaroo care to their babies.

Mobile Application
Client: The Zaky Zak
January 2018 - May2018

My Role & Responsibilities

UX & Visual Designer

My responsibilities were to conduct stakeholder’s interview, user research, translate observations into insights, create user scenarios and use-cases, prioritize the user-needs, design screen-flows, design wireframes, conduct user-testing, and design visual mockups.

The Challenge

About 4 million babies die each year in the first week of life, Kangaroo Mother Care could help 25% of them survive.

Providing and tracking Kangaroo Care need be made easy and convenient.

Background

About Kangaroo Care

Kangaroo mother care is care of preterm infants carried skin-to-skin with the mother.

It is a powerful, easy-to-use method to promote the health and well-being of infants born preterm as well as full-term. The benefits of Kangaroo care include stabilization of baby’s heart rate, breathing & oxygen saturation, blood pressure and temperature, sleep and better brain and emotional development.

The Zaky Zak: Making Kangaroo care convenient

The client has designed an ergonomic product with the sole objective of facilitating safe, prolonged, efficient and effective Kangaroo Care and Skin to Skin Contact from birth and for 3 months after due date.

Stakeholders’ perspective

“Parents who chart their baby’s day by writing everything down have less trouble sticking to a routine or establishing it for the first time.”

Design brief

Designing a mobile application that works with a sensor-based Kangaroo care sack to enable parents for tracking and monitoring Kangaroo care and baby’s vital signs

Research & Analysis

Creating User Scenarios

I started mapping the user scenarios to understand the context of the usage, user needs, and pain-points.

User needs

Prioritization of use-cases

Based on the user needs and the capabilities of the sensor-based product I started prioritizing the use-cases.

1

Primary needs

Track & monitor Kangaroo Care

Track sleep

Monitor vital signs

Auto-tracking by sensor

No manual inputs required from the user

2

Secondary needs

Share with caregivers and care providers

Track baby’s growth

Track breastfeeding

Manual tracking

Manual inputs required from the user

Design approach

The intent was to focus on primary needs & information automatically tracked by the sensor and to make data easy to understand for parents having no medical background

Wireframing

Translating insights into tangible ideas

Onboarding

Monitoring vital signs

Checking a week’s progress

Key Features

Focusing on Health status rather than on numeric values for health parameters

Making health information easy to understand for all those who might not have a medical background.

Simplified experience

To make health information easy to use, providing average health numerical values as default values for setting alerts while also allowing the user to make changes if needed.

Motivation through Gamification

Allowing parents to set goals for Kangaroo care, track each caregiver’s progress and motivate each other to meet their Kangaroo Care goal.

How it works

A guided journey for easy onboarding and configuration

Step-by-step onboarding and configuration to help parents quickly setup the app. Providing option to add other caregivers to the account and therefore allowing all of them to access the same account from their devices.

Dashboard that provides quick access to health data

One-step access to all the health-related information for easy tracking and monitoring with least manual efforts.

Timeline to track progress, also acts as a journal

Timeline to help parents keep a chronological record of baby’s health progress, which can also be shared with the care providers in the form of a report. The timeline can be used as a journal where parents can also add pictures, notes etc.

What I learned

Empathy in the Design process

Creating user scenarios helped me better empathize with the users, i.e., new mothers. Understanding the user context truly helped me define the design approach.

Data visualization for better information consumption

Numerical data does not necessarily make sense to all, especially for people who have no prior knowledge about what that means in the real world. Visualizing data makes it consumable by a wider audience.