research Q.
1) what symptoms are common between various mental illness.
2) when does it occur?
3) what are the methods to avoid pathogenic?
4) How do patients perceive auditory hallucination?
5) Does the patient recognize auditory hallucination as imaginary but cannot avoid, or recognized as reality. If depends on individual, how do the majority perceive?6) Its Duration? Other symptoms picks up by its effect?
7) What are the products in the industry supporting mental disorder?
8) How are their daily schedule like?
9) statistics of patients working, recuperating, hospitalized.
10) how are families involved? Their distress, life style, commitment, relation.
11) Governments financial budget for this industry?
12) symptoms of side effect from medication? short/long term effect.
13) how much welfare dependence, welfare benefit? breakdown of how benefit are used. (medication, medical expense, living, food, tabacco...)
14) how to determine the right medication for individual?
15) common plead between the patients? (e.g. head feels hot, need something like charm to rely on, feel hot, feel cold)
16) is there a way for them to communicate/express better other than words? drawing? creating?
17) how are their motor skills? do they seem to struggle in any specific area/movement/action ?
18) does the symptom continually occur during the day? or is it on and off? morning/ noon/ evening?
Toshi,
ReplyDeleteThis is a great list of research questions. If you research each of these, and learn as much as you can to try to answer them, you will achieve a high degree of empathy for your users. You are asking questions that will require you to imagine yourself as a person with psychosis. Of course, this is probably impossible (since you are not psychotic), but as you grow as a designer, you will develop better skills of empathy, and then you will be in a very good position to conceive a new product that will improve life for this surprisingly large user population.
There are enormous incentives to help these people lead more independent and successful lives; now, government spends a lot of money on providing services to, hospitalizing or incarcerating people with mental illnesses that may be treatable. By looking into these expenditures, you will begin to develop a business case for the product you are planning to make. As long as you can show that the cost of your product is offset by savings to society, then your product will succeed commercially.
Now that you have this list of questions, you should be reading everything you can find to discover the answers. Good luck, and please post what you discover on the blog, so we can all follow your progress.
steven