Designing better products for people with asthma
At Asthma UK, we’ve partnered with two major public funders to create a multi-million-pound asthma health technology fund.
New technologies hold incredible promise to transform how people manage their asthma and ultimately could reduce asthma attacks and deaths. But too often new products take a one-size-fits-all approach and don’t understand people with asthma, or the different ways people respond to different types of medication.
Driving forward the development of better products
To help drive forward the development of better products, we’ve been working with the Public Health England’s highly respected Behavioural Insights Team to better understand the behaviours of people with asthma.
While the work isn’t finished there are some fascinating insights, some of which might seem obvious to someone with asthma, but most are overlooked when designing solutions.
For instance, there is a strong physical and emotional association between the use of a reliever inhaler and the reduction of symptoms. In turn, this can result in people becoming over-reliant on their reliever. However, regular use of a reliever is often a sign of uncontrolled asthma, which can be life-threatening. Recognising the emotional attachment to reliever use therefore needs to be built into solutions to help people manage their asthma.
Sharing insights with designers of the next generation of technology
We’ve also learnt more about behaviours towards the preventer inhalers, which don’t provide the same amount of immediate symptom relief as a reliever. Instead the benefits of the preventer inhaler are typically delayed, more ‘invisible’, and only noticeable after a long period of use (at least 3 weeks). Little surprise, then, that many people think their preventer inhaler is not working and may stop using one even though it’s more likely to provide long-term benefit than a reliever.
It’s these insights that we’ll be sharing with designers of the next generation of technology to help people with asthma. We hope that by providing a much clearer picture of the problem, they can come up with solutions that reflect the real lives of people with asthma, and ultimately reduce asthma attacks.
You can read more about leveraging behavioural science to design better asthma health technology on our website.
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