Cognitive Design

When we forget to take our medications (or decide not to) it ends up costing billions of dollars annually due to additional hospitalization, ER visits, testing and other medical care. But why do fail to take medications as prescribed?  Some argue that the main reason is that drugs cost too much or that they produce side effects we will not tolerate. According to Express Scripts Lab, the main reason (69% of the time) is behavioral. We forget or procrastinate and miss a dose, are slow to refill or don’t go to the doctor to have a prescription renewed in a timely way.

This is an opportunity  for cognitive designers because prospective memory (remembering to remember), managing procrastination and helping people deal with complexity  falls squarely within our discipline.

And there have been some interesting attempts. Two covered on the Cognitive Design Blog include GlowCaps and Smart Pill Boxes.

But we have a long way to go.  Taking your meds can be complex business especially if you take more than 4 regularly and must do so on a different schedule.  Insight into just how complex this can get also comes from Express Scripts Lab. They built a risk model to predict 6-12 months in advance  if someone is likely to stop taking their medication. It works with 98% accuracy (which is amazing) but relies on some 400+ factors including  for example, if you have children in the house and if you are male and have a female doctor.

I am interested to hear from readers that are working on the Rx non-adherence problem.  What insights do you have from studying people that have developed natural solutions by and for themselves?

The Management Innovation Exchange (the MIX) is hosting an open innovation challenge to identify radical ideas (hacks) and success stories that illustrate  how to dramatically expand the leadership capacity of an organization.  Called the Leaders Everywhere Challenge they believe the key is to redistribute power so more individuals can participate in leadership and to equip and motivate emergent leaders to be effective without formal authority.

My entry is titled Using Micro-learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders.  It demonstrates with a success story how you can use cognitive design to do interesting things in leadership development. Check it out and please leave your comments. I’ve copied an extend summary below.

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A recent episode of Through the Wormhole explored that question.  They examined how experts can ask questions and read eye blinks to figure out which playing card was drawn  from a deck, use an fMRI machine to build up a dictionary that maps brain states to the things we see in the world and use a neurofeedback device to help us achieve peak performance and learn new skills 230% faster.

The work on neurofeedback for peak performance is being done by Advanced Brain Monitoring.  In the show they demonstrate how their neurofeeback device can be used to help amateurs mimic the brains states of an expert archer to accelerate skill development in using a bow and arrow.  The device is shown to the right. Note the clip at the neck line. For learners, it sends a haptic signal to let them  know when they have achieved the expert/flow brain state.

They are also using the device in number of other domains including improving teamwork in complex settings.

Definitely not an off the shelf solution but it is ready made for research oriented cognitive designers.

EdX is hosting a free on-line course, Behavioral Economics in Action, starting October 13, 2013. The course has been created by experts from the University of Toronto and will include guest discussions from industry leaders.  Despite its academic origin the course promises to have an applied focus:

“…we go beyond the theoretical foundations of the observed phenomena, and develop a framework that allows the students to critique, design and interpret experiments; and to learn a process of designing choice environments to nudge behaviours. In short, this isn’t simply a course that exposes you to Behavioural Economics, it gets you to think and act like one!”

There is even a final project where you will develop a solution (nudge) to a specific decision-making problem.

The course runs for six weeks and takes 4-5 hours a week in effort. Well worth it to polish your nudge design skills. I am taking the class and hope to see readers of the Cognitive Design blog there.