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Swallowcare: A Care Companion App for Dysphagia
Project Results
By conducting extensive mixed-methods research including surveys, interviews, and diary studies, we developed a centralized digital platform for dysphagia care that addresses fragmented support journeys by providing cohesive tracking, personalized education, and community-based motivation for patients and clinicians.
Existing Issues
Problem Statement
Initial Research
To explore the complexities of the dysphagia care journey, a comprehensive multi-method research study was conducted to understand the roles of care teams, find where patients seek diagnosis, and evaluate the efficacy of current telehealth and tracking technologies. We utilized:
27-user Qualtrics survey to gather quantitative data on demographics and diagnosis challenges
11 in-depth interview sessions with a diverse group of stakeholders, including patients, Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs), an ENT, and a dietician
Social media mining of over 1,100 comments from YouTube and Reddit
A week-long diary study with five patients to monitor daily routines and symptom management
Competitive/comparative analysis of eight different platforms to identify gaps in existing digital health solutions.
Research Findings
There is no unified or central support hub.
Survey showed that users mainly turned to organization websites like NFOSD as resource support for education.
There are limited resources.
59.3% of patients we surveyed faced difficulties in getting diagnosis.
There is low patient health literacy.
From interviews with SLPs, patients don’t even know what a normal swallow looks like and lack understanding of their own anatomy.
There are different needs across user groups.
Our survey results show that users have a variety of conditions, with stroke, surgery, and other types of dementia being the top three.
There is a fragmented digital care journey.
Our competitive analysis reveals that all current digital solutions, including general telehealth and dysphagia-specific ones, covers only a small fraction of the care journey.
To translate our research into a concrete product strategy, we identified five core User Needs and established their corresponding Design Implications:
Initial Design Sketches
We evaluated our initial sketches through a In-person focus group session with 4 non dysphagia patients from a design background, assessing our concepts with the following types of questions: Key benefits & potential barriers, Specifics: Feedback on specific sketches (Mascot, Journal, etc.), Accessibility with a focus on physical/mental disabilities.
Design Round 1: Low Fidelity Wireframes
To evaluate our wireframes, we conducted 1-hour feedback sessions over Zoom with a panel consisting of 6 Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) and 2 Dysphagia Patients. We guided the evaluation with key questions focused on procedure, accessibility, and overall feasibility.
Design Round 2: High Fidelity Prototyping
Call to Action for Daily Exercise Tasks
We built active communication/call to actions into the home screen to remind users to complete exercise and various tasks.
Dedicated Page for Education Content
We centralized the educational content having it accessible on the home page.
EAT-10 Integrated into Onboarding
We integrated EAT-10 or CARES for repeated quantitative progress assessment and patient reported outcome for providers.
Added Personalized Diet and Exercise Content
Empowers further customization and filtering of features and library items based on user’s condition specificity.
AI Chatbot Feature
Minimizes direct involvement of clinicians on the platform and collaborate with their existing workflow.
Evaluation + Validation
We executed two evaluative phases to test the interface's logic and its real-world usability:
Cognitive Walkthrough
We conducted three online sessions via MS Teams and Figma, involving two UX Designers and one SLP. Each 45-minute session focused on specific tasks—such as completing onboarding, logging a dinner (yogurt), performing effortful swallow exercises, and interacting with the AI Chatbot.
Usability Testing:
We recruited five participants with diagnosed swallowing disorders from UserTesting.com to provide direct feedback on the application. These individuals, who represented a diverse range of symptoms and techniques, were asked to complete the onboarding, log a meal, practice exercises, explore the Learn Library, and query the AI Chatbot. We evaluated their success through experience descriptions, identification of confusing points, and a 5-point satisfaction rating scale.
Evaluation Findings
Onboarding
Requesting sensitive medical data before establishing trust creates barriers to entry.
Educational content placement feels disjointed and lacks the necessary context for new users.
Food Logging
The home page logging component should prioritize dysphagia specific info than calorie counting.
Inconsistent measurement units prevent users from accurately inputting serving sizes.
Exercise Flow
The "Well done" message is misleading, implying the entire session is complete rather than just a single rep.
AI Assistant
The abstract "sparkle" icon may not effectively signify an assistant feature for all users.
The feature requires clearer visual cues or text labels to ensure it is easily discoverable.
Conclusions and Next Steps
We proposed a centralized digital platform designed to provide cohesive support for tracking, create bonding for adherence and support, and offer educational libraries around dysphagia. Our testing confirmed a strong core flow and feature sets, but identified areas of improvement in content strategy and copywriting as well as trust-building through onboarding.
Our next steps involve incorporating the changes and conducting another round of evaluation. Finally, we will prepare comprehensive documentation for partner hand-off and design files for software dev hand-off to ensure a smooth transition to production.