California-based Karten Design firm, a group made up of design researchers, design strategists, industrial designers, digital designers and mechanical engineers, is working with companies in the healthcare space that are trying to commercialize their technology.
Karten Design’s Principal, Stuart Karten, has written an article in which he discusses how use of “invisibles,” implanted devices such as insertables, electroceuticals, and digi-ceuticals, can overcome the hurdles wearables have encountered.
The problem is, many people are still uneasy about having a device actually inside their bodies. There is a “creepy factor” that Karten says leaves some patients reporting that they feel like robots. In an exclusive interview, he shared about Karten Design’s mission to reduce this feeling in patients in order to ultimately improve health outcomes.
What evidence have you seen that indicates this is a signifcant challenge and led you to focus on the need to “humanize” implantable devices?
There’s no question that there is a wave of technology that is morphing from wearables outside the body to invisibles. What we’ve been asked by multiple clients is to ensure that people have a good experience and that they are engaged because otherwise it won’t be effective. The perspective of those people making the technology was, well these people need it, so they’re going to have to live with everything that goes along with it. Nobody was looking at it from a patient-centered perspective, and that’s what we’ve been doing with a number of our clients.
The products have been standing out because they are actually designed well, they look good, they’re not stigmatized and the whole overall experience is addressed. You don’t have to be tethered to a wall when you’re charging it. There are different scenarios when you’re out and about and you might need to program it. There are a whole bunch of use cases that we’ve been putting through good user-centered design principles.
What types of changes are you making to allow patients to feel more comfortable with the technology?
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
One way is to give people an actually sense of control. If you take an implantable cardiac defibrillator, you’re literally living with a super computer inside of your chest. Of course if you need it – it’s fantastic – it saves your life. The way it works right now is there is connectivity in it. They put a box in your bedroom and at 5 a.m., they presume you’re in your bedroom asleep. It probes all of the data off of it and casts it back to the cloud or Medtronic or whoever makes it, and maybe if your doctor is interested in it he can look at it. But currently you have no access to that data, which is really kind of mind-blowing because it’s in your body.
If we release that data and allow it to come back to the patient, what could we do with it? We’ve learned so much about what people want. They want the information because it’s in their body. If it helps them in a way that helps them live longer and stay out of the hospital, they’re absolutely interested. These are methods we are using to get people to be much more open and re-frame how people think about these implantables.
In your article you compare the adoption of impantables to the days when it was foreign to swallow pills. How long do you think it will take for this technology to become more of the norm?
There are a lot more “digital natives” now who are much more in tune with connectivity and the value and expectations that come from that. The creepy factor will be overcome when they see they are having advanced performance. The more this technology gets out there, the more people will see there is high value in it.
Are you keeping the older generation in mind in particular when commercializing these products because they are the ones who need these devices more often?
Very much so. We put people into “digital immigrants” and “digital natives” [groups], and the people at the senior levels right now, 65 to 80 years old, these are digital immigrants. They’re coming around with things like iPads, but they’re suspect of technology. On the other end, we’re doing a lot of research on baby boomers right now to understand what they’re expectations are. They’ve accepted the value [of technology] partly because it was part of the workplace and you had to learn it.
As Karten writes in his article: “Technology must be seen as an ally in the health journey, not an intruder. By considering the patient’s journey as a whole and understanding their cognitive, emotional, and physical interaction with implantables, we can build a comforting context around the technology—and make the implantable experience a little less scary.”
Karten will be speaking today at the SoCalBio Conference in Long Beach, Calif. to discuss this subject as well as the general idea of why putting the end-user experience, especially on an emotional level, should be a priority with device development.
Photo: Flickr user Kenyaboy7
