Memento
Team Project Interaction Design
Introduction
This Interaction Design team project focused on gaining experience in planning and executing a human centered design process featuring research, ideation, synthesis, concept development, prototypes and a final presentation. My team partnered with the start up Memento, a team aiming to address the critical need for early detection of Alzheimer's disease in primary care settings.
The Memento Cognitive Battery Assessment is a digitized series of cognitive tests that are administered to patients who present early signs of Alzheimer’s Disease. This assessment provides clinicians an objective measure of cognitive function through the administration of individual tests that assess different cognitive domain measures, such as memory, attention, and executive functioning. The wide selection of different cognitive assessments has been carefully handpicked through collaboration with neurologists and Alzheimer’s Disease researchers at Washington University School of Medicine. To realize Memento's solution, our team developed a clear digitized cognitive assessment that captures the same diagnostic information as compared to a clinically-administered test.
Concept Development
The current assessment model requires a test administration by a psychometrician, a professional test administrator who provides psychological testing services to patients in hospitals and research centers. Memento's goal is to gradually transition this digitized system to a remote-accessed service that can be self-administered by the patient. Digitized administration of this test, even with a psychometrician, presents many benefits that the current traditional testing model does not provide. While conducting design research to clarify issues to address, our design team each individually shadowed a psychometrician administering these assessments as pencil and paper tests to patients in the clinic. Testing sessions often took about 45 minutes to an hour to complete, and during this process, patients were frequently anxious, frustrated, and emotional. Even upon completion of the entire battery assessment, appointment delays were frequent because psychometrician were required to manually input entries into the computer. The current process was labor-intensive, inefficient, and was prone to many scoring errors.
Here are some of the benefits the digitized product provides:
1. standardized scoring measures
2. automatic score inputs and calculations
3. game-design elements to generate more patient viewer friendly assessments
4. streamlined testing administration and flexible interactions between test administrator and patient
5. score presentation with normative data and individual performance for all clinic patients
• normative graphs and figures allow physicians to more easily communicate results to patients and families in the context of the patient’s demographic and current cognitive functional abilities
• allows physicians replay physician’s testing performance to family members who may be confused as to how scores translate to diagnostic outcomes
• generates a database of well-organized retrospective cognitive data to conduct large scale clinical studies
Conclusion
Below is our final group presentation on digitalizing the battery exam. Through prototypes and diagrams we were able to visualize an alternative to the traditional pen and paper testing.
