“Circles of Care” is a service allowing friends and family to improve loved ones’ stay in hospital by providing comforts that were chosen by the patient himself. A set of 4 design ideas is proposed: patient 'wish list', bedside “delight center”, community website, and phone application.

The service mediates the relationship between the hospital patient and their social circle.

Using ICT, friends & family can provide comforts, participate in events remotely and maintain flows of communication with the patient. The service is personal, adaptive to local conditions and accessible through a variety of technologies

Click here to see how it works

Experience Prototype

We created experience prototypes to test our service on the side of the patient as well as the friends and family.

Prototype 1:
To test our service on the family and friends we created a Circles of Care service for our very own IDII community. We pretended as if Ruth and Bernd were hospitalized in Ivrea and emailed friends and family to offer their support through our service. Touch-points included emails, websites of Bernd and Ruth's personalized wish lists and a comment page which allowed the users to send us comments about our service.

To experience our prototype click here.

Here are some of our findings:

“Very cool idea, especially because of ever increasing global community. Was definitely going to use the service. Would be useful for me personally as my family is spread out all over the globe. “
Vincent, A test user, Cape Town

Prototype 2:

With our second prototype we wanted to test our service on the patient. For this we went to the local Ivrea hospital and presented a patient called Carlo with our Circles of Care catalogue. We asked him what the small things were that he was really missing from home. He told us that he really would enjoy a salami. We left the hospital and made our way to the nearest market. An hour later, with the approval of the hospital staff, we presented the patient with his salami.

Carlo's reaction:
"This is amazing ! They made my day! I have to call my wife!"

Next: the system's scope