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.
Accomplishments
- Grade: 10.
- Semi finals in TU Delft health initative. Reached top 7.
- Obtained funding for a research proposal related to her MSc thesis.