Welcome to the last course of your EPIC-AT Fellowship, Understanding Innovation.
This course focuses on the design process of developing digital health solutions for older adults with complex health needs. The lessons encourage you to take an empathetic and iterative approach to designing solutions. Please watch the following welcome video by Bianca Stern, former Executive Director of the Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation (CABHI), to learn more about the course and its objectives.
After completing this course, you will be able to:
- Define innovation, its lifecycle, and be able to incorporate applicable insights from the disciplines of design thinking and implementation science into your work.
- Describe the role of end-user engagement and empathy in innovation.
- Discuss the processes and the challenges in developing, sharing, and adopting innovation in an AgeTech context.
Required Group Work
During this course, you will be placed into groups of 3-5 based on skillsets and common research interests.
You and your group members will participate in a design challenge and must create a mock prototype for a given problem. Please note that each group will have their own allotted Slack Channel. Throughout this course, you will complete activities that will prompt you to think about how to approach and better understand what you are designing and the individuals or group you are designing for. Group activities will be completed within short, allotted times to encourage rapid decision-making and have strong deadlines (almost every Friday). At the end of the course, you and your group members will have created a sketch of a very early-stage prototype, which you will submit for feedback to older adult knowledge users from CABHI’s Seniors Advisory Panel (SAP) via the Leap Platform. SAP is a group of 18 older adults and caregivers with broad professional and life experience that represent the voice of the consumer. They provide valuable end user input to CABHI projects at all stages of development, including: 1) feedback through focus group discussions, 2) input on how to make products user-friendly and accessible, and 3) insight on how early-stage ideas could have real-world impact.
The activities you complete as part of this course are meant to prepare you for your final EPIC-AT capstone project where you will work as a team to ideate and potentially prototype solutions to real-world problems presented by older adult, caregiver, industry, and community stakeholders.
Some deadlines to consider:
Please add these dates to your own calendars.
April 11 | Group Introductions and discussion of the problem statement and vote on the aspect(s) you would like to focus on. Recommendations:
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April 18 | Understanding the problem context and framing the problem. As a team, please book a meeting with Ty Redublo to discuss. |
May 2 | Empathy map: Understanding needs, motivations, drivers, challenges and wishes. |
May 9 | Ideation sprint. |
May 16 | Choosing strongest solutions and best prototype vote and meet with Ty Redublo. |
May 23 | Present prototype to CABHI Seniors Advisory Panel via the Leap Platform. |
May 30 | Final prototype sketch and prototype information sheet. |
Total Estimated time: 5-6 hours