MindHarbor
Empowering ADHD teenagers to improve medical adherence in an engaging and scientific way via real-time hyperactivity data
My Role
Project Manager Literature & User Research End-to-end Experience Design
Team
Mentor: Dr. Wendell Wilson Vida Lin (UI Designer) Riddhi Madeka (Industrial Designer)
Client
Industry Sponsored Project in ID Studio Client: Cognizant, Spencer Osborn & Cody Colon-Berezin (Cognizant Expert)
Timeline
Jan - May 2023
Problem
Changing Treatment Plans, Side Effects, Lack of Autonomy
The ADHD medical treatment for teenagers is a changeable and ongoing process. During each medicine transition period, they experience a lot of struggles that prevents them from adhering with medicine from 3 perspectives shown below.
01 | Changing Treatment Plans
ADHD medication is a process of trial and error. Every 6 months the treatment plans would be changed due to drug resistance.
02 | Side Effects
Though the medicine helps teenagers to concentrate to school work, it has side effects like headache, insomnia, decreased appetites, etc.
03 | Limited control of treatment
Caregiver and parents are usually the predominant roles in this ecology of care, limiting the autonomy and willingness for teenagers to voice for themselve.
As a result....
“Taking medicine is always a battle until my daughter gets 11 years old.” -Parent
“I feel different from my friends and I don’t want to be picked up for therapy.” -Teenager
“My daughter’s medicine plan changes a lot since it may stop working after a while” -Parent
“I don’t like the side effect of medicine like headache, sleep issue, mood swing, change of appetite and not being able to focus” -Teenager
From user research with patients, caregivers, and parents, we understood that those challenges are especially prominent in medicine transition period.
Solution
Introducing MindHarbor
MindHarbor is an App that empowers ADHD teenagers to improve medical adherence in an engaging and scientific way. With a companion smart pen that is designed to collect real-time hyperactivity data and a virtual assistant, Dr. Messy, the App helps ADHD teenagers better manage their ADHD symptoms, allowing them to effectively communicate with caregivers about treatment plans during medicine transition period.
Background
Sponsored by Cognizant, MindHarbor is the output of ID-6212-1 Graduate Studio 2 Health&Wellness. Advised by Professor Wendell Gordon Wilson, our initial goal is to design a physci-digital product that helps teenagers with chronic disease to improve their medication adherence.

Medicine intake monitoring with Dr. Messy
‍

❌ Forget about taking medicine
❌ Don’t know the side effect when taking medicine
✅ Automatically update medicine intake frequency with notification

A smart pen to track hyperactivity

❌ No quantitative data but mere self report to evaluate medicine effectiveness
❌ Don’t know whether the medicine is effective or not
✅ Measure hyperactivity data through the smart pen when users are writing

Daily well-being Check-in with Dr. Messy

❌ Delay in experiencing side effects for too long before changing dose
✅ Talk with Dr. Messy to update daily well-being and keep aware of side effects

Data tracking and synthesis

❌ Don’t how to make suggestions about changing dose without evidence
✅ Track hyperactivity data and synthesize daily check-in to an accessible report

Approach
My Contribution
Product Management, User Research, Experience Design
As the Product Manger on the team, I took on the role of outreaching and stakeholder relationship management, contacting with expert from Cognizant and users. I actively engaged with product planning, strategy proposing, and milestone setting for the team.

Also working as the UX Researcher & Designer, I advocated for conducting user interviews, synthesis sessions and brainstorming workshop to fully validate our concept from multiple perspectives. I also mapped the experience of product by creating user journey, user flow, wireframes, and design guidelines.
Literature Review
ADHD patients have to be constantly monitored by the care givers. Due to the nature of disease, sometimes patients forget to adhere to medication for the following reasons.
Executive function deficits
Medication stigma
Medication side effects
Dosing inconvenience or ineffectiveness
User Research
Talking with parent, doctors, and ADHD teenagers
After conducting market research and competitor analysis, we found out that current market doesn’t have enough solutions about the medical non-adherence problem for teens with ADHDs. This finding asserts our design direction. To target a specific problem scope, we conducted user research with different stakeholders in the entire ecosystem of parents, doctors and teens. Our goal is to narrow down the problem scope by understanding their painpoints and generate possible opportunities.
Synthesize interview data to common themes and key insights
After conducting the interview, we organized the interview data through affinity map analysis. With this bottom up process, we grouped up five main themes as research insights.
Key Findings
4 challenges for ADHD teenagers, caregivers, and doctors in medication management
We synthesized and condensed insights to 4 key insights that address the obstacles and challenges faced by ADHD teenagers, caregivers, and doctors.
ADHD teens’ symptoms are volatile and change frequently
“Her non-adherence of medicine gets better when she grows older.” -P2
“She likes entertainments and animal themes to concentrate.” -P1
ADHD teens face pressure from academics and social tension with peers
“I have troubles with school work and feels embarrassed of havingADHD.” -P3
“She has a lot of tension with her sibling and personal connection in general” -P1
Caregivers record symptoms and collaborate with doctors to deal with symptom change
“I need an easy and integrated way to keep daily record for providing feedback with doctors .” -P4
“My daughter's medicine regime changes a lot.” -P1
“I concern about the side effect of medicine a lot.” -P1
ADHD doesn’t cooperate with parents and caregivers in many aspects
“I tried many different alternative methods for treatment other than medication but doesn't work for my daughter” -P1
“I also tried many ways to help her adhere instructions but doesn't work.” -P1
User Journey
We synthesized and condensed insights to a user journey map which described a very common circle of switching medicine that teens may experience during their medical treatment.
The entire user journey would last from 3 to 6 month, starting from the point of diagnosis, getting used to the medicine, experiencing side effects, adjust to a optimal status for a while, and finally switch medicine again due to loss of effect or other side effects. During these different stages, we found that teenagers feel the worst when they are experiencing persistent side effects after switching the medicine. Besides from physical pains, they also face difficulties of communicating with doctors about the doses due to their lack of voice and communication gaps from policy (e.g. parents can only reach out to doctors at certain times).