Fall Detection App — UX Case Study

Published in

Prototypr

8 min readSep 27, 2019

Introduction

This UX Case Study is based on my idea when I joined IndonesiaNEXT 2017 by TELKOMSEL. I succeeded in the top 30 from all around Indonesia. Yeah, it’s one of my achievement during college. It’s the best moment!!

For your information, IndonesiaNEXT is a CSR program by TELKOMSEL that purpose to give competence to students all around Indonesia, so that students can compete in a global era. Okay next!

They gave an instruction to all finalist:

“make an idea that can grow up the market value of TELKOMSEL. Can use already a product of TELKOMSEL or something new.”

So, I got an idea! TELKOMSEL will sell an IoT product, in this case, is smartband and alarm. It can help to monitor the elderly condition from a distance, whenever and wherever from the smartphone, we can monitor a health condition or where his current position. I named this idea is Fall Detection App. I want to make my idea as a UX Case Study.

Why did I think this idea?

Background

A few months ago, when I was in college. My mother who is 57 years old, falls in the bathroom. And the sad moment is, nobody knows while my mother was fell, even my family member who is at home, meanwhile I was on campus. Finally, my mother got sick.

Not only that, even I often see an elderly still activity outside of the home unattended. It is so sad. I feel my heart is burning when I see elderly being outside of the home unattended.

Based on data that I obtained from Kementrian Kesehatan Republik Indonesia (2009), the elderly are people who have >55 years. The population of elderly in the world (2015) is 0.9 billion and estimated at 2050 reach 2.1 billion.

While in Indonesia. People who have 15–59 years old are very many. It means, there will be an increase in the human population at the age of 60+ years. So, we must still be keeping, protecting, and monitoring our family. Because getting older, the physical condition weakens. Elderly very easy attacked by a disease. The most disease attack the elderly is hypertension, arthritis, stroke, PPOK, and DM. Because physical condition weakens and attack of disease, the elderly prone to falls when doing activities.

Falls in the elderly can cause a concussion, even worse can cause death.😮

Solution

So.. Based on my story above. I want to create an application that can provide information that there are elderly family members who have fallen. So other family members can make decisions correctly and quickly.

How Does It work?

How this application works using two devices. First, alarm as a warning sign for the member of the family the elderly in the house. It installed in the house. Second, a smartband as a device to detect the elderly fall or not based on the calculation of vibrations and shocks that have been determined.

Design Process

Defining problem

First thing first before I define what is the problem. I do research for some people. I created an online survey using typeform. Working with real data is a good starting point. I gathered 51 respondents. With this data, I can get what is the main problem. As for the questions I ask :

“How old are your oldest family members?”

Common answer: >55 years old

“What disease is being suffered by your elderly family member?”

Answer: Stroke, Diabetes, Rheumatism, Hypertension, Cholesterol, Osteoporosis, Gout, Arthritis.

“Have your elderly family members ever fallen?”

Common answer: Respondents said yes.

“Imagine! If your old family member falls down, what are the things you did for the first time?”

Common answer: Call other family members and bring to the hospital.

“Imagine! If you are given the responsibility for monitoring your old family member all day so that nothing bad happens to him, what complaints/problems will you feel?”

For this question, I got several quotes directly from users :

“Actually, I have no problem to monitoring but the problem is when I am not at home I will definitely be restless.”
“I can’t monitoring on all the time because of activities that can’t be left behind like college or work.”
“Bored.”
“Unable to sleep because they must always monitoring all the actions they do to avoid unwanted things.”
“Can’t monitor every time.”
“I can’t do other activities.”
“Will limitations in activities because they will always monitor and continue to control their condition.”

“If a tool/app is created that is able to make it easy to monitor your elderly family members, how much do you want and need it?”

Answer: From 51 respondents, there are 82% who need it.

As an addition, I also interviewed several users faces to face. They said similar things. “It’s so hard if should monitoring every time. Because of must work, school, etc.”

I can conclude that many elderly have already suffered from a disease who need monitoring by a member of a family. But, a member of a family can’t spend the time to much, because of work, bored, and its activities become limited.

So, my assumption was validated by users. So, need to be created an app for monitoring the elderly from a distance, whenever and wherever. So can make decisions correctly and quickly when happening something bad in the elderly. Without spent time too much from a member of a family.

User Persona

From my research, I have got several problems that will solve and got target users. So now I know what features that will I put into Fall Detection App. Okay, lets to meet Alex!

Use Cases

To got different context I used JTBD (Jobs To Be Done) Framework. So I know “what, when, and why” users would use Fall Detection App.

Main Design Features

From problems that have defined, now will determine what features will be in the Fall Detection App to solving those problems, and the result follows:

Tracking position the elderly.
List of devices.
Contact list family.
Contact list hospital.
e-Payment with TCash.
Monitoring heart rate.
Fall detection.

Information Architecture

Tracking position of the elderly

Based on my research, to answer worries about how the current condition of the elderly. We need a feature for tracking the position of the elderly and how elderly current health condition. After opened application, the first thing we look is a map, we can see the elderly position, how far between us and the elderly, and if we click position of the elderly we can see the heart rate and how long will it take to get to the position of the elderly.

List of devices

This feature to see all devices connected to the smartphone. One app can be monitoring more of one elderly. And we can see the devices online or not.

Contact list family

Based on research too. I added the family group feature. For what? for contact other family members. If something happens to the elderly, we can contact our other family members only from this app, we don’t need to exit from this application.

Contact list hospital

Still related to the above, common answer from respondents if the elderly fall is contacting other family members and bring to the hospital. So I added a feature to get all contact list hospital, so we don’t spend time searching for hospital telephone numbers. On this feature too, we can get a hospital telephone number based on the closest location of the fallen elderly or other filters. We can send an ambulance to the elderly to give first aid or drove him to the hospital to be given help there. And we can see which hospital that present BPJS service and how far a hospital with the elderly. I set a list of the closest hospitals that users will first see for quick help.

e-Payment Tcash

Tcash is an online payment from Telkomsel, but now the name has changed, the name is LinkAja. I joined IndonesiaNEXT in 2017 and I write in 2019. Ok back to the topic. User can pay a hospital bill using Tcash, Tcash integrated with this app. How does it work? The hospital will send bill to the app if the user clicks this menu, the user will see the bill and if the user clicks the bill, the user will be redirected to Tcash app. So if the user can’t come to the hospital, the user can pay from a distance or other conditions that might occur. So easy right?

Fall Detection

So, how does the application notify if an elderly person has fallen? On the app, the user will see a red frame on his smartphone and elderly who have fallen will be circled in red in its position on the map and there is a text on the bottom. (e.g Kakek Buyut terjatuh). And on the alarm, the alarm will sound loud to give a warning sign that an elderly person has fallen. It will notify people in the house.

Sketches

The first step I do before creating the High Fidelity Prototype is sketching, to help me visually imagine it. Sketch very important for me to brainstorming.

Wireframing

Next, I create a wireframe to get a picture of how the app looks like. A wireframe is a low fidelity layout of the design which has 3 simple but direct targets:

1. Presents the main information group

2. Draw the outline of structure and layout

3. Vision and description of the user interface

It will be your product’s main structure after you created a wireframe correctly. Just like the blueprint of a building, it describes details clearly and specifically. Read complete below.

Basic UI/UX Design Concept Difference Between Wireframe & Prototype

The terms of ‘wireframe’ and ‘prototype’ are always get confused by designers, despite the experienced designer…

uxplanet.org

Visual Design

Finally, I created a visual design after sketching and wireframing. And a mockup looks like this:

Conclusion

Fall Detection App very useful for the family who has an elderly. We can easier for monitoring and take a quick decision if something bad happens to the elderly. This design is definitely still lacking and not perfect until I do usability testing.