HEALTHCARE AT HOME | PREVENTION | eHEALTH | SELF-MANAGEMENT | LIFESTYLE

Bo

Designing an intelligent agent for safe cardiac activities

An intelligent network agent -called Bo- helps children diagnosed with Congenital Heart Defects and their parents to realize the boundaries of safe physical activity.

Researcher:

Hosana Morales

PhD Candidate at TU Delft

Design methodologies:

Text analyis
Natural language processing
Creative facilitation
Data-enabled design

Project type: Master Project
Integrated Product Design

Domain: Design for Healthcare

Design Level: Service Design

Outcome: MSc Thesis. PSS.

2020

Challenge

Parents of children with heart defects often feel anxious when their child is engaged in physical activities. Sometimes this results in limiting children in these activities, even if the child isn’t showing any symptoms. Health care professionals increasinly realise that providing parents with statistics isn't an effective way of helping them overcome their worries. This project addresses this challenge by creating a smart solution that could facilitate a safe level of physical activity for children with Congenital Heart defects, whilst managing parents’ anxiety around their child's physical activity.

When you’re designing for children, you’re also designing for the relationship that your design has with the parents.
Hosana Morales

Result

Bo was designed to support parents and their children with Congenital Heart Defects to understand better the safety boundaries of exercise during free-living conditions. With an activity tracker and nine system modules, Bo aims to guide the child through different heart rate zones defined by doctors. Furthermore, Bo has a conversational agent function where parents can send concerns to the medical team and find relief when seeing their child’s heart rate zone visualized in the physical activity path.