Synopsis of how our studies influenced our design

Cultural probe:
There was not enough communication between the single parent family members. Children had busy school schedules while the parent had busy work schedules. Sometimes the workplace would be far from the school so face-to-face communication was not be possible.
Therefore...
We want to provide a way for them to communicate (even family members are far apart) with the limited amount of leisure time that they may have overlapping.

Personas:
We developed two personas, Jim Jackson: a student and son of a single parent; and Mary: single mom, busy taking care of her son and going to work. Jim had some communication issues with his dad, causing strain between them. Mary, on the other hand, had to worry about her son, go to work, and had to worry about her health condition.
Therefore...
For our persona we decided to stay with Mary and her son. The main problem that caused their lack of communication was that they were both very busy that they don’t have time and they don’t know whether the other person has free time to make the communication. In order to solve that, we have developed an app for the smartphone that asks the users to input their schedule for the week and also individual events as the week goes on so that when both family members have shared free times, the application will send a push message to notify them so that they know they both will be available to communicate.

Journey Framework:
We liked our health care idea a lot and we want to stay with it and improve it, as we look back at our journey framework. We found that Mary was very busy throughout her day. She has to manage her work / transportation schedule around. And often she forgets to take her medicine which may lead to health problem.
Therefore...
In order to solve that, we have designed an iPhone case which helps detect the vital signs: heart rate, temperature detection, blood pressure, and respiratory rate. It will report its results on to the users’ iPhone application, and there is another option which the user can choose to either send the result to their relative or not.

Participatory Workshop:
From the participatory workshop, the children said that they wanted to be able to personalize what gets shared with their parents. Also they wanted the device to be customizable in appearance.
Therefore...
So, in order to encourage the child to use our application while not having to share every little detail of the events, we will give the user the option to set privacy options for each category of event. For example, all the details of work- and school-categorized events will be shared with the parent, while personal events like parties or other things may appear as just time blocks in the calendar. By giving privacy, it will encourage children to use our app and not feel the need to use a separate application to keep track of their personal events which will compromise the effectiveness of the app to find mutual free times. Also, our app’s theme will be customizable and the phone case will be available in different styles. The case will be soft touch plastic to not feel like a medical device.