As mentioned in my last blog post, I went deeper into researching specific first aid procedures which are related with the selected disease topics.
I went through the mind map for chronic diseases I created and evaluated whether there are first aid cases related to these.
In doing so I recognized there is a differentiation necessary between what is a disease, a symptom or a suddenly occurring disease event. This is sometimes hard to tell, since we all known terms like cardiac arrhythmia, cardiac arrest and heart attack, but don’t know the connection between these. Some of these terms are influencing each other as a risk, a symptom, a consequence etc. That is why I use the term „disease topic“ to cover all of these in the following.
Also this brings this research to the question where to set the focus as a chronic disease can have plenty of disease events and, vice versa, a disease event can cause chronic diseases.
Disease topics regarding first aid practices
- Cardiac arrhythmia (chronic disease): Can have multiple ways of consequences, leading to multiple disease events such as stroke (disease event), cardiac arrest (disease event) and developing new chronic diseases (dementia, heart failure).
- Diabetes (chronic disease): Diabetes has a lot of different consequences, not all of them lead to an emergency case, but those leading seem to mostly affect the heart (e.g. cardiac arrest) or circulatory system. This merely leads to using a defibrillator or providing sugar containing drinks or snacks.
These previous points seem very common as general first aid practices which might already be widely-known. The emergency calls are happening very early. Also there might already be enough good solutions existing in terms of prevention, learning and in emergency cases etc.
On the other hand there is a chronic disease, which seem to need a different kind of emergency practice:
- Epilepsy (chronic disease): Can express itself in different ways, but having in common that an affected person needs to be placed securely going through a regular seizure. An emergency call is not needed at all times, the decision depends on how drastic the seizure is.
This seems to provide a more uniform way to develop a user-centric and technology-based solution to ease this form of decision making.
Further steps
Regarding to what I discovered, I would like to focus more on first aid practices and pain points for epilepsy, as this promises to be different kind of emergency. I want to accomplish this by diving deeper about the specific first aid practices and already existing solutions in search for possible pain points.
These steps will bring my research into a first converging phase.
Resources
- Healthline Media: https://www.healthline.com/health/arrhythmia
- Gesundheit.de: https://www.gesundheit.de/krankheiten-symptome/diabetes/folgen-komplikationen-id213716/
- British Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org.uk/first-aid/learn-first-aid/diabetic-emergency
- Hopekins Medicine: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/epilepsy/types-of-seizures
- Epilepsy Foundation: https://www.epilepsy.com/recognition/seizure-first-aid
- St John Ambulance: https://www.sja.org.uk/get-advice/first-aid-advice/heart-conditions/cardiac-arrest/
- Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-attack/symptoms-causes/syc-20373106#complications
- British Red Cross: https://www.redcross.org.uk/first-aid/learn-first-aid/heart-attack#3
