New toolkit can help device manufacturers, kidney patients partner on technology
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Mariana spent most of her time as a grocery store cashier with shifts bracketed by homework for nursing school and night classes.
While she enjoyed living close to her parents, she looked forward to the day when a nursing job would open doors beyond her small town. Her health was never something she gave too much thought to until one day, while talking to a customer, Mariana collapsed. After waking up in an emergency room, a doctor said that her kidneys had failed because of undiagnosed hypertension.
Her world changed.
It was not just the surgeries for vascular access, the infections that caused hospitalization, the diet restrictions or the effects of the dialysis treatment. It was the emptiness caused by the loss of her job because she no longer had the energy to stand for 8 hours a day. It was also hopelessness from dropping out of school and the humiliation of relying on her parents as if she were a child again.
It was the fear that came from watching people in the dialysis chairs not come back. It was the tunnel vision from focusing on surviving the day that made other treatment options seem overwhelming.
While this story is fictional, it echoes the lives of many people with kidney failure, the problems they face and the losses they experience living with a chronic disease.
Human connection
Early stage startups and preclinical researchers developing alternatives to conventional dialysis want to make the lives of people, like Mariana, better. But these innovators often lack a holistic perspective of the people they are trying to help. They may emphasize science and technology advancement against clinical benchmarks rather than addressing the needs and problems faced by specific people.
What would happen if, instead of describing an alternative to conventional dialysis by its clinical benefits, it was described in terms of how well it addressed problems in a specific person’s life?
Kidney Health Initiative
The Kidney Health Initiative’s (KHI) Human-Centered Design Toolkit for Kidney Failure frames innovation in terms of solving people’s problems and addressing their needs rather than science and technology advancement. Human-centered design applies this framework by treating people with kidney failure as consumers who look for products that address their needs without adding significant burden. As with a consumer in any marketplace, their perspectives and contexts should be integrated into the design and evaluation processes of any innovations.
The KHI toolkit offers three empathy tools to help early stage startups and preclinical researchers designing alternatives to conventional dialysis. These empathy tools help translate Mariana’s story into design inputs, widening the lens beyond technology development against clinical objectives to technology development against the whole life of a person with kidney failure.
Instead of only perfecting a technology or managing a clinical variable, the toolkit invites innovators to focus on changing people’s stories.
The first tool, called the Innovation Scale, is a new framework that describes the relationship between patient needs. It relates patient, clinical and critically non-clinical needs by positioning basic needs as prerequisites for aspirational needs.
The second empathy tool helps innovators begin to segment their market. Three fictional ambassadors attempt to capture the spectrum of people with kidney failure on dialysis. Each ambassador faces different problems, lives in a different setting and has different expectations of their therapy with stories that should inform the design of a new product.
The final empathy tool is a matrix of metrics tied to design principles. Design principles describe the emotional result of solving a problem in a person with kidney failure’s life. Metrics provide measurable approaches that demonstrate a technology has satisfied the intent of the design principle.
KHI is committed to making this toolkit a useful asset for the community. A public comment period is now open until July 1 for anyone, particularly early stage startups and preclinical researchers and people with kidney failure, to provide feedback that strengthens its utility.
To read the toolkit and participate in the public comment period, visit https://khi.asn-online.org/projects/project.aspx?ID=7.
- For more information
- Zachary Cahill is the artificial kidney product specialist for the American Society of Nephrology. He can be reached at zcahill@asn-online.org.
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