From the beginning, the team realized that the problem we were asked to solve would be far more complex than it seemed on the surface. The broad problem space in which people, even when their lives literally depend on it, are not very good about following doctors’
orders to maintain good health, or recover from a major trauma or surgery. More specifically, people have trouble being adherent to their care team’s prescribed medication plan.
To these ends, catalia health had prototyped and tested, and would now be bringing to market an answer to the medication acherence part of the equation in the near term, and perhaps an answer to the more holistic problem of maintaining good health in the longer-term. Their answer is Mabu, a bright yellow-orange, plastic robot that maintain quasi specific verbal conversations with people. It was this framework and context that the team began to work within, attempting to solve for the complexities of multiple med- ication management, via a conversational UI, which would be laid on top of a non-generalized AI, in the form of a physical robot.
Therefore our challenge became:
How might we create an easy-to-understand, simple set of conversations for Mabu to help patients manage the complex, perhaps very unpleasant, but life-saving task of managing their medications?