I was the go-to person for design thinking. I made sure the team was always thinking about the users and their needs. I led design workshops and made sure everyone was on the same page. I also helped create all the digital and physical assets we needed.

CERN
POSICS2 Team

Generate new ideas and develop prototypes that address grand societal challenges inspired by CERN’s open science, technologies and its experts.

CBI takes a non-linear, experiential approach to learning and innovation where experimentation, failures, and iteration are expected and encouraged along the way. It brings together design, systems thinking and future thinking methodologies to bring both a top-down and bottom-up view of a particular challenge, in addition to a push against the infrastructures and strong-held assumptions on which our contemporary world and wicked problems are built and sustained. CBI also requires students to use their hands as well as minds through making and prototyping activities.

Our gang began by putting various problems from our respective points of interest to a vote in order to quickly focus on a problem. We eventually voted to focus on addressing problems with geriatric care in the Western Balkans, which were brought to our attention by Tamara (our Serbian teammate). She is a native of the area and raised many issues with the public health system in Serbia. We then began trying to narrow this very broad challenge down so that we could create maximum impact in the region. The problem on which we decided to focus, morphed over time and was reframed significantly in light of findings from our research, interviews, and validation process.

Elderly people in the Western Balkans doesn't receive necessary medical care, particularly in rural communities. This is due to a lack of understanding of geriatric medicine and the marginalization of the elderly population. Solving this problem would have numerous benefits, including improving the quality of life and extending the years of active life for the elderly population, reducing the burden on the healthcare system, increasing access to healthcare services for the elderly, promoting equality, improving the overall health and well-being of the elderly, reducing the social and economic costs associated with the treatment of illnesses and injuries in later life, and enhancing the reputation and image of the Western Balkans as a region that values and cares for its elderly population.

Increase the access to healthcare for the elderlies in the West Balkans by utilizing one of Attract's technologies.

We used the design thinking in conjunction with system mapping  to understand and empathise with the users and understand the system that affects them.

For the research, we had three steps preparatory, secondary and primary research.

Preparatory research had data analysis and desk research aiming to understand the premises for the secondary research. We usd this step to guide our secondary research, frame the problem accordingly and understand what's possible scopes of solution.

In the secondary research, we did trend, market and target analysis, understood the specificities of health services and dug deeper in understanding all of the technologies that we were able to use. We gather data from the WHO, EU and other public data resources and read a great amount of articles on public health systems, gerontology, academic medical education and health awareness in the Western Balkans.

The primary research was divided into two parts: healthcare and elderly. For both, semi-structured and guerilla interviews were conducted with individuals both in and outside of the Western Balkans. The goal of these interviews was to gather data and insights from a diverse range of individuals with relevant experiences and perspectives.

We ended up interviewing (Over 20 people) General Practitioners, Cardiologists (because we learned during different cycles of research that atherosclerosis are the biggest cause of years lived with disability and the biggest cause of working days lost in Serbia), university professors (In geriatrics, medical studies and cardiology), experts in digital health, caregivers and pharmacists (Also, during research, we learned that it's easier to build trust with people than institutions and that pharmacies were the most visited health institution in the balkans due to trust and proximity to people's homes). On the patient side we interviewed elderlies and elderlies' family members.

The findings reveal a pressing need for greater accuracy in prescription specifications in rural areas, as even small errors can have devastating impacts on the health of elderly individuals. The growing trend towards personalized medicine highlights the importance of considering each patient's unique needs and conditions, and the lack of geriatric education, both academic and awareness, is a concerning issue that needs to be addressed through a broader, more comprehensive approach.

Loneliness is a pervasive challenge faced by many elderly individuals, and treatments must be geared towards long-term, lifestyle-based outcomes that prioritize the comfort and well-being of the patient.

The usefulness of disease screening, such as for atherosclerosis, is widely recognized, yet underutilized due to the high cost of scans and limited accessibility in rural areas. All patients must have access to affordable and convenient options for maintaining their health and independence, regardless of where they live.

There is also a lack of trust in public institutions in the West Balkans, particularly when it comes to healthcare. Over 44% of the population is rural and most do not travel far from their homes to access healthcare services. This, combined with a global issue that is continuous healthcare, increases the chances of prevention, where is cheaper and has a higher rate of success.

Use technology as a knowledge multiplier.

There's a space to alleviate the lack of formal training in geriatrics and empower individuals to take control of their health while minimize the discomfort and stress that elderly patients often experience when travelling for diagnoses by finding ways to bring care closer to them.

Early screening is critical to good health and wellbeing, cheaper for public institutions and there is an opportunity to dramatically increase both the quantity and effectiveness of them.
‍
The findings suggest that building trust with individuals is easier than with institutions and that pharmacies are the most frequently visited health institutions in the Balkans due to the trust people have in them and their proximity. This highlights the importance of considering community-based solutions and partnerships with local businesses when seeking to improve healthcare access in rural areas, leveraging the trust that people have in their local pharmacies, it may be possible to create more effective and sustainable healthcare solutions that meet the community's needs.

The ideation process involved a combination of workshops and research methods, including service ideation and prototyping, interviews with researchers, co-creation sessions with other groups, and self-organized workshops.

The final idea was consolidated after a self-organized workshop where design tools such as the value proposition canvas, service blueprint, and service design business model canvas were used to ensure that the vision was aligned and the idea was feasible, viable, and desirable. These workshops and design tools helped to bring together various perspectives and validate the idea to create a comprehensive solution.

Is important to share that we went from research to ideation a number of times, once we decided on an initial focus area we started considering the technologies we had available and began to analyse how they could best be applied, and which one was most relevant to our cause. This exercise of deep diving into how the Attract technologies could be leveraged disrupted various routes we had imagined our project would be taking. For instance, we were very excited to find that the POSICS-2 technology could be used to detect osteoporosis and was less expensive than an x-ray.

The issue of trauma and trauma prevention had come up many times in our research and we thought the ability to detect osteoporosis would allow patients to maintain mobility and independence for longer. However eventually we discovered that there was an adequate substitute for osteoporosis diagnosis on the market using very different and much less expensive and invasive technology, so we found ourselves back at the drawing board. While starting to develop a solution to detect osteoporosis, we began to develop a service to make the detection easier.​

We realized that there were many more systemic roots to our problem than we had previously realised, but that the service we had started to design would help to address a lot of them. With this in mind we decided to try to break out of our tunnel vision by adopting a losing attachment to the technologies and looking back to some of the systemic issues we had discovered in our research. This very naturally lead to our new focus - Cardiovascular Disease.

We had a booth where scientists, researchers and teachers had access to where we created a service prototype of the Visionary Health Services. The prototype was based on the service journey map that we had created in which states 9 different steps:

Where we created flyers and posters about the new service, always focusing on well-being and happiness.

With one of our team members acting as a pharmacist and answering peoples queries and through the onboarding of the app prototype.

We had also a physical prototype of the machine where people could go in and "get scanned".

Moment later the user gets a email with information about their heart's conditions and gives them different options.

If patients had any heart related risks they received an email asking them to either call the pharmacist or a remote doctor for further analysis/explanation of next measures.

The app and email always kept the patients up to date on all information needed.

They could rate the service on different touchpoints (pharmacist and email) that also promoted the sharing of this service to their loved ones.

There was the intention of check the loyalty by sending information about heart and service related articles but as promised in the booth, we deleted all "patient" related data that we gathered throughout the service prototype.

AI can be trained to automatically calculate the Agatson score using the provided images from the CT scan. Since the manual evaluation of this score is a highly labour-intensive and time-consuming task, this will allow us to scale down costs significantly and greatly improve throughput

Significant research in this area already exists, as can be seen from the numerous research papers published on the topic _{(Vonder, 2022; Velzen, 2020; Martin, 2020; Brunner, 2010)}. This idea is thus well-validated and has a technical foundation.

The main roadblocks to a more extensive application of this automated diagnosis lie in its legality (which we solve by having a qualified, fully outsourced doctor validating them) as well as obtaining all the images with the same parameters (tube voltage and current, number of slices, etc...) which we solve by integrating the whole system and working only with our machines.

Serbia provides a perfect testing ground for Visionary Health Scanners because of its high CVD rates, ageing population and treatment capacity. There will be a 3-year trial phase in Serbia before Visionary Health expands to other Balkan countries and globally. With just 55 scanners Visionary Health can cover 73% of the population over 50 without patients travelling far.

Sensors can be manufactured using well established methods in semiconductor foundries The intrinsic amplification of the APD allows us to simplify the readout electronics while achieving excellent sensitivity. AI & ML allows 25 doctors to diagnose the entire Serbian population.

The Serbian government spends over 21 million euros per year on diagnosing coronary diseases. The Serbian government could save over a 7.3€million per year just in diagnosing costs. Thanks to early detection and prevention they would also significantly reduce their hospitalization costs (~25€ million / year).

We got very positive feedback from all types of stakeholders, the doctors were very positive towards the exponential optimisation and reach of their work, while adults both in the countryside and metropolitan cities liked the different touchpoints and the aspect of the machine, very different from the scary CTs.

We manage to connect the de developers of POSICS2 and some cardiologists in Serbia which found the solution and its machine very promising. The goal is to keep working with them to create a plan of action.

The project was a truly amazing experience bringing together a diverse group of individuals from various backgrounds and fields. Working with these talented and passionate individuals provided a unique opportunity to learn from each other and grow together.

The project covered a wide range of topics, including scalability, future thinking, social economics, ethnic and international affairs in the Western Balkans, medical user journey and the intricacies of research and development in scientific and engineering fields.

The chance to learn from experts in these areas, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with real people from different countries and professions, made the project a truly enriching experience.

I've manage to create, with my group, my first service prototype in real life. It was a very stressful but enriching experience to map such a wide topic, that had a lot of different actors, touchpoints and processes.

Because of this project we'll also be partaking the Map the System Challenge so we can practice even more the learnings from this great CBI project.