McLaren healthcare neuromodulation project
This is part of a concept for a McLaren healthcare project (partnership with Google and GSK). The project was focused on designing an entire ecosystem focused on body implant devices that will allow treatment of various medical conditions via neuromodulation.
Based on our research, as well as some external ones, it was clear that one of the biggest psychological impacts of most debilitating/chronic health conditions is how it "steals" control over one's life. The more impactful the condition, and the more random its symptoms are, the less control people feel that they have on their daily routines. This is incredibly demotivating and may even push people to be defeated by their conditions and thus give up on trying yo have a normal functional life.
Usually patients have to plan or change their routines based on treatment schedules or when they need it impromptu. In some of the health conditions we were targeting, symptoms like pain, could show up randomly, making people fear for driving their kids to school, fear of supporting elderly people from their family, fear of failing at their job related tasks and even just overall fear of social judgement. Based on interviews and tests most if not all the patients involved acknowledged that this solution would bring control back to their lives and consequently, even beyond avoiding physical pain, it would be the most impactful aspect of it.
The final version of the home screen in "Treatment Mode" for the companion app for stage 02 of the project - seen in the image - represents one of the key features that would contribute largely for bringing back this feeling of control in patient's lives.
With it it will be to be possible to manage treatments (i.e. start/stop/delay/pause) and visualise the status of the current ongoing one.
Imagine having control over your body, in the sense that you can decide to stop peaks of pain at the press of a button, in contrast to situations where - if available - you had to take medication that not only would take time to act, but also would not be able to target specific parts of your body and could also have side effects in the long run..
It could be said that this was the ultimate goal of the project as is of any healthcare service/product dealing with chronic conditions - to help patient's manage their lives within such conditions and to improve their quality of life as much as possible, allowing them to keep their dignity and time to family, friends, etc.
Read more here:
https://us.gsk.com/en-us/research/what-we-are-working-on/bioelectronics-research/bioelectronics-at-sxsw/