Design For Good

When initiating our engagement with AliveCor, I couldn’t have imagined the impact the device would have on my own family, nor how intimately I would experience its value.

On an eerily warm night last December, I sat outside my parent’s house in the suburbs of Chicago, reflecting on my last few years of work in heart health. Having just helped my mother through her second open heart surgery in 4 months, it was far too close a brush with death for comfort. Yet, it made me appreciate more than ever the work that my design studio, level, is doing to contribute at a global scale. 

 As I reflected on my mother’s experience with modern medicine, I couldn’t help but contemplate about innovations in Artificial Intelligence and how lucky we are as designers to be a part of shaping the future of Medical Technologies for consumers.

The KardiMobile 6L, an advanced AI enabled ECG device we created with AliveCor, had just launched in the weeks leading up to my mom’s surgery. It became a crucial tool, providing peace of mind throughout her post-hospital recovery and gave me a far more personal first hand-experience with the device than I had ever expected.

The pursuit of positive impact is core to our founding principals at level. As a studio we strive to use design as a tool to elevate the human experience and drive toward greater good. 

This is why myself, and our team, became designers. Despite this, it is somewhat rare for a progressive client working within the medical space to walk through the door and provide a platform to stretch these design muscles. AliveCor was that client for our studio. Combined with our fundamental belief in the power of design, AliveCor’s advanced AI gave us the opportunity to create a transformative product that empowers people worldwide to quickly and inexpensively manage heart health and to vastly improve the quality of care in the fight against heart disease.

Heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, claiming more lives than all forms of cancer combined. 

I had known this fact to be true because it was heard often in meetings with AliveCor. However, no matter how many times I heard or wrote it, this was a statistic that felt very distant from my reality.  Suddenly it became all too real as I found myself spending week after week in the Adult Surgical Heart Unit. I was now experiencing first hand the impacts of heart disease on my own family and the families around me.

This hospital environment is not unfamiliar to me. I grew-up spending many weekends in hospitals visiting my mother, who was an NIC unit nurse. The transformative power of Care I witnessed during these formative years is what fueled my desire to want to help others. While my sister followed in my mother’s footsteps into nursing, I channelled this desire into my use of design as a medium, eventually leading to the founding of my studio, level, in 2016.

A pioneer in FDA-cleared ‘machine learning’ techniques, AliveCor is internationally renowned for transforming cardiac care by enabling proactive heart monitoring. 

In 2018 we began our engagement with their team. The brief: to develop an intuitive, compact industrial design language for an innovative, medical-grade, 6-lead mobile electrocardiogram (ECG) device. The KardiaMobile 6L provides the most detailed look into a patient’s heart ever seen on a mobile device. The KardiaMobile 6L: The first affordable, pocketable, non-invasive, smartphone brand-agnostic, mobile ECG product. 

It enables patients to receive instantaneous results, previously unavailable without a trip to the doctor’s office. The product puts arrhythmia detection into the hands of users. It offers users a convenient and inexpensive alternative to surgically implanted devices, and clinically adhered Holder Monitors that are tethered, bulky and must be worn for days or weeks at a time. Now, the compact KardiaMobile 6L allows doctors to see, in much greater detail, a view into a patient's heart, allowing them to diagnose heart irregularities earlier and faster, accelerating the time to diagnosis and avoiding unnecessary healthcare utilization.

Core to level’s creative strategy was developing an industrial design language that announced the cutting-edge technology delivered by the device, while instilling trust and confidence in its users. 

Our team worked to create this sense of alluring simplicity by establishing a compact footprint that could maintain the ample skin contact required by the three internal electrodes. As the device must be held steadily during the 30 second ECG read, actualizing an elegant design solution that enabled a reliable and comfortable grip was essential for accuracy.

Utilizing a single plastic part made the product appear effortless by reducing openings and seams. This technique was not only effective in minimizing parts but is also what makes KardiaMobile feel solid and almost magical in the way it is assembled. 

Our ambition was to use thoughtful design to reduce the stigma associated with pre-existing, cumbersome solutions. By executing on a modern vision and precision engineering we were able to communicate the KardiaMobile 6L’s advanced intelligence, and position AliveCor’s hardware portfolio and product experience as a category leader.

The result? The British Heart Foundation found AliveCor’s technology to be 5 times more effective in detecting heart arrhythmia than standard care. 

With over 40 million ECG readings to date, AliveCor is now the global leader in the collection and analysis of patient generated heart data.

AliveCor empowers people worldwide to quickly and inexpensively manage heart health and to vastly improve the quality of care in the fight against heart disease. Doctors can now oversee a patient’s health in-between visits, enabling them to make important medical decisions and accelerate the time to diagnosis. My mother is now one of these patients and I can testify to the profound sense of assurance it provides her, as well as our family.

The team here at level feel deeply fortunate to have the opportunity to work alongside trail blazers such as AliveCor. We are grateful to be a part of the ground swell in using advances in AI to improve the human experience. Personally, I can rest easy knowing my mother is in safe hands, because safety is in hers.

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