This week I decided that I will focus on other areas of health care such as Veterinary Medicine and Childcare
I started by looking at some articles on the subject of problems in the veterinary industry. I found this one on some current issues. This article explains that since the pandemic has started there has been a major increase in pet owners and need for virtual care for these pets. “In 2020, Telehealth platform Medici saw a 48% increase in registrations and a 170% increase in pet telehealth consultations month by month.” This has added more stress to already overworked vet staff and many staff struggle with keeping up with these new digital demands. Another quote I found really helpful from this article was…
“The rise in telehealth also brings a change in client expectations. In a YouGov poll, 70% of pollers believed that vet services could be conducted online, 61% said they would be happy to use such services and 58% would be more likely to do so over physical ones.”
This proves that there is market in this industry for a product that could facilitate this.
Mental health in veterinary is a serious issue and research shows that “Female vets are 2.4 times more likely to commit suicide compared to the average person, whereas male vets are 1.6 times more likely to do.” In a recent article in the Farmer’s Journal newspaper, it was revealed that vets in the UK and Ireland are working on average 84 hour weeks and this emphasises the fact that vets are being overworked and are in stressful fields, the pandemic has only just added to this so a product that could ease client-vet communication could be very useful.
I think there is potential in this idea so I started to create a collage of app designs and icons to do with pets and healthcare.
Next I started to do some research into areas of healthcare for children. I made a mindmap of these problems.
Within these problems there are things I cannot help with Road injury/violence is common with children in poverty and in war torn areas and the fight against climate change has been a very popular topic in digital products recently. I do think that a product could be made to help childhood obesity with a focus on healthy diet habits and knowing the calorie intake the child actually needs.
The problems children are facing in healthcare is a very broad search so I decided to narrow it down to parenting and how to help parents to keep their child healthy.
I decided to do some quick research into some parenting apps to see if there was any gaps in the market I could focus on.
I found the app ‘Kidido’.
Store everything about your child’s with this baby tracker and share it with your family, caregivers or your pediatrician so they can enter updates. This would be a useful app for helping parents keep track of the many stages of childcare. It has many features to track child care but it doesn’t seem to have any child development resources which I thought could be useful in a parenting app as knowing the basics and useful points in child psychology can help with the discipline and development of their child.
Through a healthline article, I found the app Kinedu.
This app gives parents a lot of resources and advice on how their child meets typical development milestones including mental, physical, emotional, and linguistic health. They also provide the parents with videos and other guided activities to help your child meet their development goals. This does cover most of the features I wanted to include in my product and if I did want to continue with this idea I think there is some room to improve upon the current apps. I think some of the visual design of Kinedu can be a little noisy and not a lot of type hierarchies.