Wednesday's Assignment: Proposal for Real World Observation

Observation: Language Barriers in Healthcare

Language barrier's in hospitals is a continuous problem that causes many problems in healthcare services such as overcrowding in emergency rooms, patient difficulty understanding treatments and medication, ineffeciency of translators, and the high demand for translators. In NYC, there are many diverse neighborhoods dominated by specific foreign cultures where they don't fully understand medical treatments or what medical problems constitute an emergency, as evaluated by hospitals in these areas that are dominated by these patients. Cultural differences also make talking about certain medical issues with a professional that is not of the same culture or native language as the patient a situation of significant discomfort.

Scenario: St.Vincent's Hospital Manhattan

St.Vincent's Hospital near Chinatown receives about 40,000 annual visits to it's Chinatown Clinic (located on Elizabeth Street) from patients that are all Chinese. The hospital does offer services that account for native speaking patients such as interpreters and physicians that speak Asian languages, and strives to create a hospital culture that is comfortable and familiar for Chinese immigrants. However, there are significant ways to decrease the amount of patients frequenting the hospital, especially emergency rooms, and to improve the overall quality of health care of the the hospital, such as educating on health issues before the need of direct communication with hospital staff.

Proposed Resolution

I believe that the language barrier solutions and services currently employed at this hospital could be enhanced with an interactive design that could overcome dependency on initial verbal communication, and could decrease the demand of multilingual hospital staff, allow patients to better explain their health issue, and have a better chance of being seen by a doctor. Having a visual representation for identifying medical problem areas, and learning about treatments could make patients better explain to interpreters, better understand their health issues, and trust the treatment and medicines that they are prescribed.

My idea is to create an interactive portal that is accessible directly to patients upon entry at the hospital for them to to inform the hospital of their health issue without the immediate need of an interpreter. The portal will be multilingual and will guide patients through several steps to target their health issue that will then be sent to a hospital database that will inform the receptionist of the patients issue, the treatment, and put them in the appropriate queue to be seen by a doctor. It will also ask the patient if they want to see a translator or go directly to the doctor.

Target User

Patients from the NYC Chinese-American community that use the services of St.Vincent's Hospital and have little or no English-language skills, and lack adequate knowledge about their diagnosis, treatments, and health concerns.

Technical Diagram

Interface

 

Friday's Assignment: 3 Points from Protocol Chapter 3, and discussion points on Chapter 8 & 9 of Designing Interactions (Bill Moggeridge)

Protocol Chapter 3:

-"Capital is an aesthetic object. The confluence of different discourses in Capital, both vitalistic and economic, proves this. The use of vitalistic imagery, no matter how marginalized within the text, quite literally aestheticizes capitalism. It turns capitalism into media."

-In reference to the emergence of artificial life: "emergence of autonomous vital forms appears as a distinct trend in the last two hundred years of contemplative thought."

-In reference to life becoming matter: I assert that, further to the anti-entropic theory of life (which by itself has little to say about protocol), life forms, both artificial and organic, exist in any space where material forces are actively aestheticized, resulting in a type of sculpted materiality, a materiality in which vital agents are managed, organized, affected, and otherwise made aesthetically active.

Designing Interfaces - Chapter 8 and 9:

-Chapter 8 introduces the overrall focus of the chapter by introducting the "tangible bits" that guide our interactions with interfaces. There are commonly limited ways to interact with most computer based interfaces, but we want to be able to use our other senses to experience more of interfaces then what they allow in their basic functional form.

-There have been attempts to augment "technology rich" spaces of interaction in order to create a richer experience that targets our senses in a transparent form. From Terry Winograd who describes people as being spatial
animals: "One direction has been to make abstract spaces, which capture the structure of information in a way that feels more like a real space.

-Tactile feedback and qualities of touch are essential when you are designing input devices for which these qualities are the ingredients of the solution. For non-technological products, the tactile qualities of a spoon give us important information about its useability and what it means to us. A cell phone is a good example of technology that merges digital and physical qualities and feedback in that it targets senses of touch and sound as being an important but yet transparent aspect of its interface.

-Durrell Bishop is mentioned in the reading has being an important innovator of interaction design that is self-evident. With computers, he brings up the idea that we become so dependent on icons that represent things that we want to get done that its possible for us to represent our friends as icons or products. His example of the coin was interesting in how he focused on the fact the no matter what the status of the coin is, we automatically know that it has worth and ownership based on the distance that is it from the person who possess it, and it is representative of the value that it holds. I thought his Tea Diving kit was brilliant. Although it's somewhat satirical and humorous, a user will automatically know how to use the interface tools at hand based on their real life experiences with them to save the diver from falling anywhere else besides the teacup. I really appreciate and enjoyed reading about Durrell's work as a attempt to expand the dimensionality of our interactions which was evident in his environmental project he completed of the kitchen/living room/home that shows how he is "experimenting with the potential of new products that combine the properties of the environment, the Internet, and applications in a physical representation that you can perceive and that you are likely to remember".

-Chapter 9 focuses on technology as what it says about our future, our products, and where it is going to take us in the realm of interaction.

-Dunne and Raby's Placebo Project was really phenomenal in how people were convinced that electronic products harbored a secret life for the owners that interacted with them. " Dunne and Raby became interested in the notion of the placebo as a way of making relationships between people and spaces more ambiguous and open-ended." Our relationships with electromagnetic fields shape the way that we apply and depend on technology for how we experience the world. Dunne and Raby said that "We are discovering that people are subtle in their
appreciation of interactivity, and their relationship to electronic products." Their experimentation with existential design proved how easily people are convinced of how products can change our social behavior and relationships, and thus how people become dependent on them for not always what they do, but what they stand for.

-John Maeda has some very profound theories about the future of technology and continuously introduces the fact that simplicity must be a dominant quality in the way that technological interactions function. He states that "simplicity is an endangered quality in the digital world, he adds, and it is time to break free from technology’s intimidating complexity." He is "influenced by the idea that core information connectivity is needed to provide the infrastructure behind the products that people actually come in contact with." John has made strong attempts to explain code and programming to artists and designers that don't think in terms of mathematical analysis when it comes to design, but explains how it can enhance a designers creative process and execution. His laws of simplicity are somewhat of a philosophy that designers should follow to be more successful with designing for the digital age.

-Jun Rekimoto focuses on the areas of interaction technology as a means of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality. His analysis of the drag-and-drop function on computers proves that we want to interact with digital interfaces to the point where they become ubiguitous with real life interactions. He believes that gestural interaces are a preffered form of input and feedback system so that interfaces can be aware of our interactions without us actually touching them. He believes that in the "near future in which everyone emits some kind of signal or carries some kind of sensor, so that our personal preferences and messages travel with us, and the environment is able to adapt to us in a way that we choose. Similarly, he predicts that the environment will emit local information, so that stores or restaurants are telling us about themselves and can be interrogated if we wish."

-Rekimoto comments on the future of interaction design by stating that innovators are trying to create a form of physical HTML that "combines to indicate a way forward that connects the physical and digital, and offers us the chance to design interactions that are full of the richness of form and movement, freeing us from the feeling of being constrained by our computing devices."