01Introduction

We are tearing down the walls of the hospital to bring the medical fascility for elderly at their doorstep. They need our service, We are coming to them.

The idea is to solve the problem of social isolation in elderly is by providing them medical check-up facility through a mobile van clinic which has an integrated smart medical device to capture their vitals like blood pressure, temperate and heart rate and give their medical report in their own language. We also have Virtual doctor consultation for those who need medical attention.

How might we empower the community to engage with elderly seniors in order to address social isolation needs and promote independent living post discharge from Alexandra Hospital?

We began by starting the user research in and around Alexandra hospital area like Queenstown MRT, Commonwealth area and Mei ling street. We also contacted Lions Befrienders and their headquarters in Singapore so that they can arrange meeting with the elderly people who come there regularly. We interviewed close to 25+ elderly including their family members

We observed the surrounding of the elderly folks

To cover the isolated elderly, we went around to their household and we spoke to people influencing their life directly and indirectly as well as their kin.

Near Queenstown, we managed to speak to a few isolated elderly near the bus stop, hawker centre area close to the MRT. We choose them because we observed them for a while walking all by themselves without talking to anyone else around. In Mei Ling Street, we spoke to a couple of family bound elderly, not so tech savvy, but owning a phone. On the other hand we met a group of old uncle living alone who were mobility constraint and dependent on each other. At Lion Befriender’s Centre, we found a bunch of enthusiastic elderly, playing games and chit chatting with their friends.

Customer Journey Map

After all the data we gathered from personas and journey map we went on for building our ideas for the solutioning.

We categorized our solutioning according to technology specific ideas by using a 1 minute approach. All the team members came up with all possible approached to improve the condition of social isolation among the mobility constraint elderly with the help of healty elderly.

This step was primarily to segregate the goals, pain points and user interactions to help build a better experience for the elderly.

The team then went for another round of idea generation this time all possible wild ideas. This helped in having a larger solution space to our design problem.

We finally came up with a variety of ideas and then started filtering them based on feasibility and appropriateness of the target audience. This was followed by discussion on solution flow, our services and features where we analyzed the blueprint of our service design.

Mobile Clinic - Being the mobile clinic at the doorstep.

Our solution includes a mobile clinic which will be sent to the community once a week after spreading information about it with pamphlets distributed in the area. In order to ensure that this information reaches every house we will have our volunteers to promote this information in the target area.

In the mobile clinic we will have a community interaction set up in the form of round table conference.

This is to give a more comfortable atmosphere to the elderly so that they don’t feel that they are coming to the hospital.

Drafting service blueprint

Drafting a blueprint of our service, helped us to understand the connectivity between our key features. It helped us to understand what features we may of overlooked while creative ideation.

For example: We could think about the registration process of the patients at the Mobile Clinic and come up with the ways to capture the registration details of each and every patient coming to the mobile clinic

It gave us clarity of all the support services needed like connecting to the doctors in the hospital and also think about possible chances on service failure in this case due to unavailability of any doctor at that particular point of time. We could also think through about how we will be managing the services at the Mobile Clinic and fill the gaps in it.

06Idea Validation

We validated our idea with 10+ potential users. Most of them were the elderly people whom we interviewed. They could understand the Chinese translation through the translator. They were interested in the mobile clinic solution as they thought it provided them not only the medical advise but also a community to connect.