PRS Australia PhD Examination - Paraq Meshram (School of Design - RMIT University)

Remedying Error: Addressing Medication Adherence Errors at the Intersection of Healthcare Insights and Industry 4.0

Situated at the intersection of industrial design and healthcare, my practice-based research focuses on developing prototype-based design propositions aimed at enhancing medication adherence among people with diabetes, drawing insights from clinician’s experiences of treating such patients. This research, being undertaken through creative practice, focuses on exploring the possibilities of using physical computing, hardware devices and sensors to provide a smart medical home environment for people with diabetes. Investigating the gap between medication management concerning clinician’s expectations from the patient and the challenges of the patient adhering to the medication regimen is undertaken to design IoT based propositional sprints triggered by the learnings of Industry 4.0 that assist a person with diabetes in medication adherence and empower clinician with information about it.

Employing the laboratory metaphor, the electronic prototype-oriented design sprints conceptualised projects as iterative cycles of concept generation, experimentation, and validation. This metaphor served as a structured framework to create a patentable system focusing on providing the prescribed medicine in time to relieve the person of the additional burden of keeping track and consequently eliminate errors in medication adherence.