Drawn in by the Sustainable Development Goal #3 – Good Health and Well-Being – which aims at reducing the global maternal mortality rate to less than 70 per 100,000 live births by 2030, researcher, designer and ‘big picture thinker’ Caroline Smeenk, a recent graduate from Carleton University, investigates design solutions to improve the accessibility of diagnosis and monitoring of preeclampsia for women in rural and remote communities.
Caroline believes that as designers,
it is our responsibility to move towards a more just, safe, and environmentally conscious world
She tells us more about preeclampsia, her research and her project:
What is Preeclampsia? How does it touch upon both health and well-being implications?
Also referred to as toxemia, Preeclampsia is a condition that causes hypertension (high blood pressure) and decreased liver and kidney function past the 20th week of pregnancy. There are many theories for its cause, but it is currently only diagnosable by its symptoms. Preeclampsia precludes Eclampsia, which results in seizures, strokes, miscarriages, or death if not treated. The only way to fully relieve the symptoms of preeclampsia are birth and medicated treatments.
The health of a woman and her child are of the highest importance, and this subject speaks to the life and death nature of this condition. This project also hopes to touch on the well-being of mothers during pregnancy, both physically and mentally. Through my research, I found that woman in rural areas of Canada lacked access to specialized doctors to regularly monitor for this condition, and had to travel at their own expense for long hours, multiple times each week to receive the recommended care. I also read first-hand accounts of instances where women felt they had not been listened to by medical professionals about their symptoms, and felt unable to advocate for their health needs. The thesis of this project is to empower women with greater knowledge and treatment of their conditions from home, to help better predict symptoms but also to emotionally benefit mothers.
What was the subject of your thesis at Carleton University? what did you want to achieve?
My undergraduate thesis at Carleton University is titled “Maternal Care for Preeclampsia in Rural Canada”, and is the cumulation of eight months of research into rural women’s health in Canada. The final product is a conceptual design for a set of digital and physical products that allow expecting mothers to monitor and track the symptoms of preeclampsia from within their home.
Living in a country with universal healthcare, you can forget that accessibility of services can greatly differ based on where you live. For example, 17% of Canadians living in rural or remote communities live over 2 hours away from a hospital. Specialists can also be difficult to access: only 3% of Obstetrician Gynecologists practice in rural Canada, serving 22% of our population, with many general practitioners no longer performing births. Through this project, I hoped to begin to examine what a system of healthcare could look like that would increase accessibility to life-saving diagnostics and monitoring to women living in these hard-to-reach rural areas of Canada.
Caroline Smeenk, Storyboarding
Why did you chose this subject? why did you decide to link your research to UN SDGs?
Our graduating class was encouraged to explore projects that fit into the UN SDGs, as a way to frame our work within the context larger systematic changes we want to see in the world. In my view, as designers it is our job to advocate for a more just, safe, and environmentally conscious world through our work.
I am also a lover of design research, which is the area I am now working in post-grad. I knew I wanted to choose a subject that I felt passionately about, but had less intimate knowledge of and could deeply research and explore throughout the year. When I began researching about the challenges women in rural areas of Canada experience during pregnancy, I knew it was work that needed to be explored more deeply.
In what ways do you believe that design can help improve physical and social development?
Design is one component to building better systems and services to improve our physical world, and will be most powerful when used in conjunction with other disciplines: people in policy, engineers, politicians, those in healthcare, and many more. Both as a tool and a mindset, designing is a way to understand and create solutions for challenges in our world. In my mind, the best design starts from a point of examining the underlying needs of people, and can contribute to change by initially ignoring pretense or conventional methods of development. Designers intuitively look to create physical artifacts, systems, or services that are novel, and can be both constructive but also destructive to what exists. When working with others and focused on impactful issues, this can help improve the spectrum of opportunities we see for change in the world.
Urine testing strips
Why do you think it is important to use design tools in healthcare?
For a lot of designers, myself included, healthcare is an overwhelming area to look to make improvements. Bureaucracy and tradition are steeped into a system designed slowly and gradually over time, in part to protect the people it has a life changing impact on. It can be easy to lose sight that healthcare is largely a system of people; people interacting with one another and with the physical world to try to produce positive outcomes. Including design as a lens to better understand the needs of these people early in the process to create new solutions or improve conventional methods in healthcare is critical for improving our systems looking forward. Bringing design as a tool into not only how we think about physical artefacts of design, but the processes and services that we provide can improve what healthcare looks like in our rapidly changing future.
Nuns cap
Find out more on Caroline’s project here
