Inspiration

I have seen first hand how hard living with aphasia can be. Simple tasks like communicating what they need or having a conversation can become frustrating. The main thing I took away was how it affects your independence. This inspired us to create Caedance. We focussed on healthcare as it is so important to be able to be understood by others, but often you will get stuck in a loop of calling, filling in forms or fast paced conversations. We wanted to help people engage more with their care.

What it does

Caedance is a prototype for personalised healthcare communication and navigation for people with Aphasia after a stroke. The user experience has been designed around images, short keywords and optional speech/text. We want the user to be able to communicate their needs and understand responses whilst linking to appointments, conversations with their care team, transport and follow-ups.

How we built it

We used Base44 to create the prototype. We used Claude to help us design and improve features. We also used GitHub to help organise our code. We also looked at plugins and skills. We split the overall idea into smaller interactions. Often when designing the screen we found issues with the design. We were often asking users to type, read or explain something but there wasn’t any support for them to do this.

Challenges we ran into

The first challenge we faced was deciding what not to include. Whilst an all in one healthcare assistant sounds exciting it was too vague. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to make the user communicate with the assistant without using fluent speech or writing. We had to think outside the box with the chatbot design to make the assistant personalised, visual and provide support for communication. We also had to consider when the assistant wouldn’t understand. If the sentence is clear but doesn’t match what the patient wants then it isn’t helpful. We had to make sure we provided a way for the user to say ‘that’s not what I meant’.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of taking a personal idea and creating a prototype with a clearer purpose. We are particularly proud that we focussed on giving the patients control. We tried to ensure the assistant wasn’t taking over but instead gave the user more control over what they were saying. They could personalise, review and correct what they were saying. We have improved our collaboration between GitHub, Claude and Base44. We have learnt how to break down our big idea into smaller parts.

What we learned

We have learnt how to collaborate using GitHub, provide Claude with more useful context, use plugins and skills. We have also learnt how to review what has been created. The biggest thing we have learnt is that accessibility will change the whole interaction. Instead of asking ‘what can the assistant do?’ we asked ‘can the user have control?’

What's next for Caedance

Next we want to test our prototype with people with aphasia and speech language professionals. We want to know what communication methods are useful, where confusion occurs within the interface and when they would require support from a human. We also want to improve the links between communication, appointments, transport and follow ups so they feel like one journey. Whilst Caedance was inspired by my grandpa, his experience can’t represent everyone. We want to take other peoples experiences into consideration.