Telebility
Researching and designing a telehealth system that addresses existing age and language barriers
Overview
The Problem at Hand
During my third year at UC Irvine, I enrolled in an introductory health informatics class. The two major projects for the class were writing a research paper that discusses the attempted solutions to a current problem in public health and writing a research paper that proposes a novel technology-related solution to the public health problem discussed in the first research paper. The second paper had to include a mockup of the proposed solution.
As an informatics major specializing in human-computer interaction, I partnered with a public health major on the projects. We noticed that using technology to access healthcare has been becoming increasingly popular and that these systems can feel unintuitive at times. So, we decided to research barriers to accessing telehealth related to age and language.
Research Papers
When writing the research papers, my partner primarily focused on the language barriers, and I primarily focused on the age barriers. Our initial paper referenced 11 sources, and our second paper referenced 21 sources.
The research gave us insight on the problems that non-English speakers and elderly people faced when trying to access telehealth. For example, a study by Mao et al. (2022) found that less than 37% of their elderly participants could confidently contact their care providers using video calling communication methods. This shows that many elderly patients might lack technological knowledge to effectively use technology for healthcare access.
Introducing Telebility
In our research, we found that there were many solutions that addressed different components of these barriers, but not a single system that integrated many of these features to effectively tackle language and age barriers in telehealth. This led us to propose our novel solution, Telebility, which is a streamlined telehealth portal that is designed to be accessible for elderly patients and speakers of many different languages.
Telebility combines accessibility features that we found in existing attempted solutions our research into a single telehealth portal. For example, a study by Xie et al. (2011) found that out of three different digital knee surgery tutorials given to older participants, the interactive tutorial with clear directions and repeatable instructions was the most effective, but some participants did not know what certain buttons' functions were from icons alone. So, I designed Telebility to have an interactive walkthrough of its features that allowed for users to repeat and navigate between sections. In addition to this, I designed all of Telebility's buttons to have their functions explicitly stated through easy-to-read labels to reduce any potential confusion.
Interactive Medium-Fidelity Wireframes
Based on the proposed features that my partner and I planned in our second research paper, I used Figma to create interactive medium-fidelity wireframes.
At the time, Figma's variables feature was relatively new, so I used this opportunity to learn how to use Figma variables to prototype the different languages, text sizes, and color themes in the user interface.
Telebility Demo
Above is a video that demonstrates the color theme selection and guided walkthrough features in Telebility's Figma prototype.
Closing Thoughts
My partner and I presented our research and Figma prototype to our class at the end of the term. Making the UI mockups interactive was not a requirement for the assignment, and we were allowed to use any software/method to create them. So one of our classmates was curious about how we made the prototype's interactions. When I told them that I used Figma, they seemed excited to learn the software.
Similar to how my partner and I designed Telebility, I hope that major healthcare portals can integrate more features that make their systems more accessible to a wider range of people regardless of their age and primary language.