Innovating Long Term Care through data and technology

Through sensors installed on the ceiling at each bed, Ancelia detects residents’ movements in real time to enable staff to watch over them during the night and intervene if needed.

In addition to helping staff during nighttime surveillance, reducing travel and stress, Ancelia’s sensors provide access to a great deal of information about what is happening in each room, such as how often a resident gets out of bed or how often he or she receives assistance from staff.

After several studies conducted in collaboration with selected nursing homes, the TeiaCare team was in doubt about what would be the best way to leverage this information to improve resident care.

To achieve this goal, we carried out a User Research process aimed at analyzing the needs of staff, to understand how to rethink the User Experience of the Ancelia dashboard that makes sensor data accessible to clinical and operational management in nursing homes.

We organised the project in three steps:

• An in-depth Stakeholder Interview with the TeiaCare team to understand the industry, the product, and their expectations about our collaboration.
• An initial round of User Interviews with nursing home staff, aimed at reconstructing the Customer Journey of their daily work and thus bring out problems and opportunities for improvement.
• Prototyping new versions of the Ancelia dashboard and testing the prototypes with potential users to identify the most effective and sustainable hypothesis to implement.

Stakeholder Interview

To kick-off the project the two founders of TeiaCare took us on a walkthrough of their business, starting with describing what led them to combine their studies in computer science and biomedical engineering to design an innovative solution in the field of personal care.

After that, we went through a complete demo of Ancelia, along with an introduction to the different roles of their customer’s teams and how the product fits in their workflow.

In closing this initial phase of onboarding, we aligned on their goals for this User Research iteration: understanding what other problems care homes need to solve that Ancelia can help them with besides night-time monitoring.

User Interviews

We created a draft Customer Journey related to the daily work routines of staff, to be used as a reference for conducting an initial round of interviews with the management of selected facilities that were already TeiaCare clients.

The interviews helped us round out our knowledge about the dynamics of collaboration within nursing homes, uncover common problems and routines, and uncover unexpected insights into staff needs.

We realized that facility management was failing to make the most of the large amount of data made available to Ancelia, due to limited time and the absence of tools that could expose the most important data clearly enough.

Rapid Prototyping & User Testing

Using the key insights from the interviews, we were able to prototype new versions of the Ancelia dashboard, with the goal of providing facility management with a few selected pieces of information in an easily readable format at the times in their daily routine when it can provide the most value.

We submitted prototypes to the staff of the selected facilities, which were then optimized based on the feedback received.

Business Development

Building on the positive feedback received from users involved in the test conducted by us, the focus of which was on the functional aspects of the Ancelia dashboard, TeiaCare has initiated a new phase of validating market interest through new commercial presentations that enhance product benefits, functionality, and pricing.