Medicine Platform for Parkinson's Patients

Building an user instructions platform for Parkinson's disease patients family members to use.

AbbVie Inc. is an American pharmaceutical company headquartered in North Chicago, Illinois and operating in Finland. It is ranked sixth on the list of largest biomedical companies by revenue in 2023.

AbbVie manufactures devices and medication for many severe medical conditions Duodopa being one of their products. Duodopa is a device dispensing medication for the symptoms caused by Parkinson's disease. As Parkinson's symptoms cause difficulties operating devices, the company needed to provide a platform for the patients' close ones to easily access and learn the usage of the machine.

Service Design

My task was to create an overview of the needs that the users have and gather information from hospital staff mainly neurological doctors on the usage of the device and medication.

For this process I conducted need finding interviews and user testing in Helsinki Metropolitan area hospitals. The interviewed groups consisted of neurologists, nurses and general doctors. In total 4 need finding interviews were conducted. The semi structured need finding interviews resulted into a set of qualitative data that could be used as a starting point to the prototyping phase.

Prototyping

I created the first versions of the platform based on the interview material and sketches created in the Service Design phase. The prototyping phase resulted into a clickable prototype of the product that could be tested with users to gather feedback on the usability of the product.

User Testing

• After prototyping the first draft of the Web based app with a clickable prototype, I conducted 5 user testing interviews were users gave me feedback on the usability of the platform. This phase resulted into multitude of change proposals to be transferred into the final product.

• Resizing of content was requested

• The clicking functionality of some of the elements was unclear to the users

• Elements changing too fast on the screen when clicked (spinner needed)

• Important earnings were gathered during this phase

Final product

The outcome of this process was to create a real platform for the users to view PDF instructions for the Duodopa Medical Device. I coded the final product using Vue.js, Node.js and Contentful CMS. The Business goal of this project was to test te feasibility and viability of these kinds of learning platforms for a company like AbbVie Inc.