Neurovine — the app for tracking brain health
Neurovine is a Canadian company that aims to empower concussion patients by measuring brain health and optimizing their recovery process. The data collected by Neurovine allows physicians to track improvement, identify triggers, and prescribe appropriate treatment — all in a way that has not yet been possible.
The Neurovine team has worked with Canada’s leading experts in the MedTech space, conducted trials in the Digital Health program at the Elizabeth Bruyère Research Institute, and worked with individuals diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome to refine the technology.
Neurovine envisions a world in which brain health is visible and accessible — empowering everyone to reach their full potential for health and wellbeing. Also, the global concussions market, as per a report by Market Research Future (MRFR), is touted to register a CAGR of 3.22%, surpassing a valuation of USD 1,060.36 million during the forecast period (2015–2023), so this niche has great potential and low competitor score.
To continue the successful market penetration Neurovine brand, we designed the Neurovine mobile app, which helps remove the guesswork from managing brain-related injuries. The vision of our invention is to connect the proprietary Brain Sensing Headbands in pair with heart rate devices through a convenient mobile user interface.
Mainly the Neurovine app is designed to help the concussion recovery process through managing and controlling users’ cognitive tasks.
The app is designed to be used by athletic trainers, physical therapists, and physicians.
When an injury occurs, the app compares post-concussion data with the athlete’s baseline data to determine when it is safe to return to play.
UI project purpose: to represent what our deep tech algorithms are providing to patients and doctors. We are making brain health accessible and visible. To do this, we need to tell the story of their sessions and how proper management of concussion is 1) helping to optimize their recovery in real-time (through visualization of the sessions) and 2) improving their health over time.
Design approach
Before beginning, we are clarifying the main pain points through empathy and a deep understanding of user needs and desires.
Identifying the usage context and user behaviors
To build a useful app concept, we usually define the places where users could use our product, including all parts of the physical world that can contact through the interaction. The user can be part of multiple life situations (e.g., work versus home). There could be various specific usage contexts (e.g., after a concussion case or prevention). And each such context affects the user experience.
Personas
When we are building user personas, we are trying to tell a story and description of a realistic individual who has a name, a life, and a personality, and it allows us to target our design focus to something specific through a constraint system simply to create a limitation of user behavior and define most valuable pieces of it.
We defined three primary personas that are involved in the first app MVP:
Many concussion cases happen in sports; therefore, we see a huge potential to cover this particular niche. Also, during a marketing study, we discovered different user segments that we were able to use. The reasons that showed us that we should work with family members and physicians’ user segments were core user goals that we can cover through app features.
Jobs To Be Done and feature list
Based on the Jobs To Be Done framework for each persona profile, we identified a list of user goals and prepared the initial user scenarios. How and when do users need to know about brain health? What data do users need to conclude? Those and a lot of more user goals were analyzed and built the scenarios based on this data. The JTBD approach allowed us to find out what the main tasks we need to consider in a purpose to be hired by potential Neurovine users.
Taking into account this information and several business sessions with stakeholders we created the list of primary features and ranged them into prioritized order.
Information Architecture: All must be in Order
The main challenge was to build a symptom map of concussion cases and consider the physical and cognitive activities that patients need to perform to make a stable recovery process. To solve this problem, we constructed a general system architecture for the entire solution and also a couple of smaller ones for each of the user personas. After a comprehensive analysis of the map, we considered the difference between the primary information we need to show users and what kind of data may be hidden.
Evolve user scenarios into user flows
It is complicated and the most critical step when we try to convert the gathering information about the users into the internal application logic. We called this step — user flow mapping. The main essence of this stage is to establish the right logic of user stories and jobs through the user flow sequence that can show us how primary features should be mapped out. The core of features target users must-see are dashboards, which consist of all parameters from IoT devices and must represent a super convenient way. This was due to reasons that the state of user mental health after a concussion. They mostly experienced cognitive disbalance and can not react fast on the shown data.
Also, the patients must have the ability to estimate the level of concussion impact. To resolve this problem, we invented the advanced self-evaluation feature that uses internal logic built on precisive questions and can help users have a deep understanding of the brain concussion state.
Draw detailed prototypes of the future app
After approval of the steps as mentioned earlier, we decided to draw high fidelity prototypes on purpose to get moderated tests on potential users and get additional feedback from physicians. This step is essential to clarify all scope of app functionality and create all technical requirements for developers.
Result: A healthcare app that inspires
The Neurovine concussion app reveals the hidden sides of the human brain. It helps users to overcome concussion challenges and guide them through the recovery process. The app does not heal the concussion, but it helps to deeply understand your body and bring more confidence that you are doing right to get the positive result much quicker. The dashboard that helps you in the recovery process is the essence of app functionality:
Another challenge during recovery was to create some ways to measure the brain fatigue level. We designed the inexpressive layout is a purpose of reducing the cognitive overload and showing the real brain fatigue level in the most convenient way
We also created a totally new way to make cognitive and physical activities during the recovery process. It is crucial because the brain is very vulnerable during any activities and needs to be controlled by physicians.
Here you can see the rest of the design.
Outcome
You have been introduced into the GDE design thinking framework through this UX case study and see what we have in the end. This healthcare case-study goal was to show that a user-centered UX design can significantly reduce all difficulties that patients have in the recovery process. This case has actively opened the new direction of design for the medical industry and healthcare and can open new frontiers in the concussion healing process.
We hope this app attracts a significant part of patients and helps them to be more productive during concussion cases and helps be healthier in the future.
If you are impressed with this work and would like to know more about how we work to hire us, use the calendar to schedule a call.
