Expansive and Contractive, Warming and Cooling to Product Release
The more malleable the process can be early on, the less catastrophic change inputs can be. Allowing engineering and QA feedback in the process early decreases downfield risks.
Hypothesis: Hemispatial Neglect testing and skills can be vastly improved using virtual reality.
In 2024, The REAL System catalog of activities benefited from the addition of physical motor skill assessments. At the completion of those, I was asked by clinical staff to explore activity opportunities in the cognitive assessment space. Stroke and head trauma victims often experience “Hemispheric(Hemispatial) Neglect” if the Parietal Lobe of the brain was damaged-defined as a neuropsychological deficit that can make it difficult for patients to detect events and perform actions on one side of their body.
Expansive: Disruption and understanding the problem set
The standard bearer for testing hemispheric neglect has traditionally been the Bells Test and its cousin, the Trace Test. Both tests are highly dependent on physical drawing ability on a standard sheet of paper. To understand how to disrupt the standards I articulated the problem set in a succinct diagram:
Bells Test: There is plenty to criticize with a standard pen and paper test.
Expansive: creating a progression towards a successful patient outcome
The Bells Test, at best, informs you to impairments and areas of neglect. How can this be improved:
Most tests have an initial assessment to articulate deficiencies
There must be a progression to improve skills towards the standard
Continual progressive assessments towards the standard
Final Assessment to meet the standard and “pass”
Increasing skills BEYOND the standard for self improvement
The Ecosystem
REALSystem primarily focused on physical impairments of stroke. The first task is to understand where it belongs in the entire ecosystem. How this new, introduced macro can fit and scale for the future. This expansive exercise helps on multiple levels:
• Reduces blindspots and edge cases
• A good precursor to creating use cases in the PRD/FRD
• Expands product knowledge
• Builds your mental map of the challenge
• Creates a modular system and scalability in your ecosystem
• Displays your strategic 40,000 ft. viewpoint
Depending on my audience’s imagination, the minimal effort paper prototype is a great way for me to run information architecture past product team and engineering for feedback. This can reduce time spent formalizing designs and keeps the ideation phase intact. I prefer this approach before approaching wireframes in Miro or Figma which can be time consuming.
Patient View
Increasing patient engagement using virtual reality
My initial concept was to recreate the traditional paper test as an old-school screen projector. Pull the screen down and start the stopwatch. Variations can highlight the correct selections and show errors to the patient or limit it to TherapyView tablet interface. Better than the original but very much 2 dimensional and did not take advantage of VR.
I was sort of inspired here by the fun interaction models of Hollywood futurism. Here I took the original design and added the HUD look and feel from the “Minority Report.” Patient is placed in a radically different environment(the Holodeck from Star Trek) with glowing tech icons that could be selected with VR hands, gaze retical or use a removal fling mechanism.
Images will obviously save time and paragraphs of writing and reading. If you have a more formal management structure with greenlighting procedures, management needs less time reading docs and trigger more creative enablement. Product and clinical teams were able to have instant “light-bulb moments” using this imagery of my proposals showing x-y-and z axis manipulation to challenge the patient to exceed the traditional standards.
Flexible icon grid progressions sets patient up for success
TherapyView
There are significant usability advantages to conducting these complicated cognitive tests with a spectator portal. Therapists can watch errors, time and scores in real time-watching the patient’s thought process in action. The tablet viewer is also the perfect tool for patient user testing observations.
Therapist Benefits:
• Instant Replay
• Order of operations tracking
• Patient score, time and accuracy tracking in patient progress
• Speed and decisiveness tracking
• Scoring over session can track mental fatigue
Expansion activities can scale to occupational therapy tasks such as:
•Finding objects in stores
•Driving and hazard avoidance
•Finding lost objects in homes
•Finding and sequencing in the correct order
Prototype of the VR Bells Test