Design partner for a startup in the health sector

Informaat has a focus on the healthcare market. Our designers have been participating in hackathons in healthcare for years and we have been a national partner of Dutch Hacking Health for 2 years now. During one of these hackathons we came into contact with Tim van Santen, an enthusiastic healtcare entrepreneur who wants to improve the lives of people with dementia. Informaat has supported Tim as a design partner. Our design of the time widget in December 2020 led to so much attention (2000 downloads) in the target group and among investors, that Tim was able to convert his idea into a startup: TimeSteps.

Tim had experienced the impact of dementia with his own grandmother. During his graduation project for a master’s degree in Health Innovation, Tim discovered that the sense of time is one of the first things that disappears in the minds of people with dementia. This is how he came up with the idea to develop an app to help people with dementia and their carers. This app is mainly intended for people who still use their mobile phone. But Timesteps' ambition goes further, namely to offer a 'cognitive prosthesis' which guides the person with dementia through the day.

The challenge lay in breaking such a big ambition into small steps, allowing Tim to quickly learn from users what works and what doesn't with a limited budget. Also, he can adapt his product in a flexible way. Direct contact with people with dementia and carers are important for this, in order to base and test ideas.

Tim already had help from various people, but not yet from an experience designer with a startup attitude. That matched well with Informaat. By deploying various design expertise, we have supported Tim in several steps from idea to a first solution, like. Think of:

• Making assumptions explicit and prioritize them;
• Devising experiments to validate the assumptions;
• Value-driven design for the ultimate user experience;
• Designing and testing prototypes, and interaction flows.

Being a startup, TimeSteps decided to start with one functionality: a widget producing time both in speech and text. People with dementia can quickly lose the ability to read clocks and consequently lose the sense of time. After a number of successful tests with users, the app was launched to further learn and improve, for example the installing and setting up by users and caregivers.

We then designed the next functionality of the Timesteps app: the daily structure agenda, giving an overview of the day, actively announcing appointments and reminders. This gives the person with dementia to achieve grip on the course of the day.

The TimeSteps app is linked to the Informal Care app, allowing the person offering informal care to fully manage the agenda. This agenda can be shared with several other carers. This is the first step towards a complete cognitive prosthesis from TimeSteps.