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Epilepic

encouraging young patients in their life
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Project overview

  • Context

    This project originated as part of our closed-team participation in UCB's Epilepsy Hackathon in Bruxelles in 2015. As some of our team members have personal experience with how epilepsy can affect people's lives and impact their outlook upon it in various aspects, our intention to create a design solution to help people in this situation was driven by personal passion.

    UCB's hackathon was a perfect opportunity to fully immerse into the subject matter for a full weekend and gain deep insights on the topic from the perspective of patients as well as expert doctors.
    Here we were able to come up with different ideas and evaluate them in fast iterations with the help of the many other participants of the event.
    Our final concept presentation was given on the last day, which received great responses along with high interest and appreciation from various sides of the attending epilepsy patients and experts.

  • Team

    Our Epilepic hackathon team consisted of the following great people (see photo below):

  • contribution

    As every team member was closely involved in almost all tasks, the results were obviously shaped by everyone's influence.

    Yet almost every individual process was initiated and planned by one or two people and then executed in close alignment  to the general plan to complement the other team member's efforts most effectively.

    My personal focus and contributions covered the following points:
    • active ideation and concept development
    • validation of ideas in the group's discussions towards a shared goal
    • keeping the team in good spirits and on track of time
    • interviewing attending epilepsy patients and medical experts
    • designing the concepts visual identity and style
    • creating an interactive UI prototype
    • designing the presentation slides

Created during an Epilepsy hackathon in Belgium, this mobile concept aims to support young epilepsy patients in tackling the up and downs in their daily lives and inspire them to follow their own goals in an understanding and encouraging way.

This is us being busy creating this project in our on-site workspace.

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User research

A condition with many faces

While talking to people with the condition, we quickly learned that a diagnosis initially questions almost everything in their life. There is no easy way to cope with this and it can take a lot of time and courage for many to regain something close to a normal daily routine.

Epilepsy is often very difficult for people to arrange themselves with which makes people feel highly insecure and prone to lose perspective easily

Coping with this unpredictable condition is extremely difficult, especially for newly-diagnosed younger people who are struggling with growing up already. Unbeknownst to most people, epilepsy can severely impact a person's social life and tends to often leave the affected person feeling isolated from their loved ones since he or she can't trust one's own condition as the fear of a seizure happening again can be overwhelming.

Self-Esteem by http://omnomwutnevrmind.deviantart.com/

This is the point where our solution comes into play:

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Our approach was to give people a tool that supports and encourages them in their situation by addressing and incorporating three crucial key factors

The select factors below were based on insights from individual conversations as well as focus group sessions with short- and longtime patients about their own situation and their personal struggles with their condition. As it turns out, often patients have experienced very similar situations in their life in relation to their condition but almost never were able to openly communicate about them with others. For us as designers ideas soon started to emerge towards tackling this issue so we started to work together closely with our various available "expert epileptics" who were actively sharing their thoughts and perspectives on our progress throughout the event.

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Epilepic aims to visually inspire young people with the goals and achievements of other epileptic patients who have already surpassed the initial discouraging phases and now can show that a good life with their condition is often well achievable.

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Supporting people to set goals for themselves and actively plan small steps towards them, helps them experience how much each individual step can become a personal victory against the felt uncertainties epilepsy can evoke.

Building anticipation by turning small achievements into bigger ones over time can help stay on track and grow more resilient to fall-backs that are out of one's own control. And despite this being a very personal path one certainly is not stuck in this alone, which provides more communication potentials that can be reached out to easily as well.

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Celebrating and reflecting upon achievements are just as much key components of this process as their planning.

Reminding users to actively consider future steps as well as relive completed experiences can greatly contribute to building people's self-esteem about what really they can do, compared to what they often falsely assume being excluded from by their condition.

Epilepic App

Discover and show how good a life with epilepsy can really be

Epilepic encourages its users to invite people of their choice to join them as part of their very personal and trusted community.

They decide to which extent others receive and share information about their personal goals, potential struggles, and achievements.
Simultaneously, our users are able to find and give inspiration about what it really means to live with epilepsy.

Sidekick app

Our complementary Sidekick app expands the reach of our users beyond epileptics themselves and targets friends and family members of who might be struggling with the condition from the outside position.

This app aims to help the surrounding people understand their loved one's condition better by clarifying common misconceptions about epilepsy and providing an alternative connection to accompany them in regaining their personal life.