Throughout my career, I’ve designed and collaborated with Ford Motor Company, IDEO CoLab, Lucid Motors, The Art of Living Foundation, LIM Innovations, Fundación Tarahumara José A. Llaguno; currently volunteering at Inneract Project.
I’m currently looking for opportunities in Social Impact Design. If your team strives to work with organizations to help build ethically responsible solutions with communities through design strategy, I’d love to collaborate with you.
An Interaction Designer, Design Researcher, and Strategist.
An Interaction Designer, Design Researcher, and Strategist.
LIM Prosthetics Care Guide is a service that enables local Syrian citizens who wish to help their community, to be trained with LIM prosthetics technology, and help provide ongoing care to refugees experiencing first-time amputations.
Brief
Conduct in-depth research on the Syrian refugee crisis, identify an opportunity area, and create a section of a deployable, end-to-end service with multiple touch-points.
Tools
Sketch, Adobe Illustrator, InVision, Keynote.
Partner
Approach & Role
Our team focused on creating a service that addresses the amputee crisis growing among Syrian refugees. We collectively researched, analyzed, and built the service. I built and led the prototype of the Prosthetic Care Guide app.
Team Members
Jennifer Kim, Weiwei Hsu, Nathaniel Smith, Andrés Hurtado
Instructors
Length
13 weeks
Problem
Syrian Refugee Crisis
Due to the ongoing conflict in Syria, an estimate of 1 million Syrians are physically injured, and roughly 80,000 need prosthetic fittings to replace limbs lost in the conflict.
Learn more about it here.
About the Service
We focused on creating a platform that addresses the amputee crisis growing among Syrian refugees - our service enables local citizens to be trained in LIM prosthetics and provides ongoing care to refugees experiencing first-time amputations.
A universal training protocol to help train local people to fit prosthetics.
In partnership with
Universal Training Guide:
Our main goal was to create a training experience for the refugees, but we knew language would be a problem. Our idea was to create a training guide that would include a universal language, whether it was through iconography or images, videos - something that allows anyone to be able to look at it and get a basic understanding of what is trying to be conveyed.
The training experience is divided into 3 days of training, and a three-week shadowing sessions
1
On the first day of the session, all of the trainees introduce themselves to each other. The prosthetist spends the rest of the day walking through the current situations of their patients, the process of treating and fitting patients, and things to keep in mind as they learn and help fit patients.
Patient Assessment Chatbot
Assessing the patient is an important first step toward providing prosthetics care. Some amputees may benefit from using prosthetics over wheelchairs, while some may not.
This is a chatbot that helps the medical center to verify the patient’s situation. It is also a tool used in the training process to help trainees in understanding the key components of patient assessment.
Text the chatbot at +1 (619) 308-6066,
or view the Facebook Messenger chatbot here.
4
Over the course of the shadowing session, Amira begins to understand the complexity of assembling and fitting a prosthetic and is able to know all of the steps involved.
Once the shadowing session is over, Amira schedules an on-site evaluation with the prosthetist, that will help the prosthetist to evaluate if she understands all the components toward the fitting and care-giving process.
Prosthetics Care Guide
The Prosthetics Care Guide (PCG) allows trainees to review at home the lessons taught by the prosthetist in charge during the training at the Medical Center.
The lessons are divided between day one, day two, and day three of training, as well as the three-week shadowing sessions, offered at the end of training. Each lesson includes subcategories of the information taught in a simplified, and more digestible way than the physical version, yet still keeping the all the valuable content for the trainee to review.
2
On the second day of the session, Amira walks to the medical center where she meets the patient that will be treated that day. Amira and the other trainees are given the information about the patient that was filled out during the chatbot pre-evaluation.
3
On the third day of the session, all of the trainees are shown how to customize the prosthetic for the patient and observe how to fit it onto the limb.
As the three-day training session ends, the trainees are given an evaluation of their performance up to this point. They hear what they are doing well so far and what they can improve on, which will be addressed during the shadowing session.
5
She spends the next few days studying the Prosthetics Care Guide and visiting the medical center for studying the prosthetics in person.
6
When the final evaluation day comes, she visits the medical center to show her learnings. She passes the test and the staff helps her to schedule a patient visit.
7
Amira is now able to help fit prosthetics on amputees and feels happy that she is able to contribute to the community in some way.
Discovery and Synthesis:
In order to identify a specific problem in the Syrian refugee crisis to design a service for, first, it was critical for us grasp and fully understand to the best of our abilities the context of the crisis. As a class group, we went through a two-week defining phase where we gathered as much information possible, which was later mapped into the refugee's journey from beginning to end.
Synthesized research can be viewed here.
During the discovery phase, our group went into detail about barrel bombs in order to address the need of getting prosthetics to the amputees, not only because of a shortage of people but because of the sheer amount of different injuries from these bombings. We shared key insights and nuggets we received from all of the interviews and secondary research we did.
After pointing out some possible important areas of research, we demonstrated a few design directions we had, such as providing a self-care kit for the patient, creating a mobile care unit, or establishing a psycho-social peer network.
Defining the Problem Space:
As we conducted and synthesized our research the path to creating a macro service become clearer and clearer for us. From partnering with a local champion to train locals to provide care, to providing follow up care.
During the process of creating the end to end service, we recognized we had a large landscape to explore and decided to focus on the training component of the service, because of the people we talked to, we saw that there were not enough people to actually provide the care, although there can be a supply of prosthetics since most prosthetics companies have a non-profit arm. There’s a need for training people to provide prosthetics care and help people get fit.
Trainee's Journey
A journey map was created in order to show the educational training experience from a local in Lebanon who will potentially become a trainee to treat Syrian refugee amputees. The potential trainee’s experiences are divided by the high-level stages of the training journey (beginning to end), the actions taken, the multiple touchpoints involve, and the possible thoughts that might generate through the journey.
Product Delivery Model
In-Process Service Blueprint
Prosthetic Care Guide Wireframe
Prosthetic Care Guide App
Day 2 of Training
Project's Process Documentation
