"Digital health apps are a thing of the past," says Zemingo CEO Robert Priscu. E&M Computing Group (TASE: EMCO) unit Zemingo plans, designs, and develops through outsourcing, products with mobile interfaces for startups. "No one develops an app and puts it in an app store for free anymore with an option for premium upgrading to order to make money. These products don't make back their investment. Development costs aren't what they were a decade ago. Apps as products went out in 2015," he says.
Instead, Priscu says, the app is now part of an interface that supports a product or service. "This isn't just in the medical sector. In other sectors, too, we're less inclined now to consume apps as individual products and more as a way of consuming existing services, such as banking, financial, and so forth. For example, an app for managing the air-conditioner doesn't try to reinvent the air-conditioner; it changes a person's interaction with the device.
"This change can be very valuable. For example, if the user tells the air-conditioner, 'Make me comfortable,' the air-conditioner tries and gets feedback. It eventually learns, and knows what temperature, power, and direction to use, depending on the conditions. So you changed the consumer's life without completely overhauling the air-conditioner. You can tell the consumer later, '90% of the people around you have put their air-conditioner on. Do you want to put yours on?'"
A product that gives value for everyone
In the medical devices and pharma sector, the goal is to make a difference by improving the interface between a person and the medical service (taking a drug can also be a medical service in this context) or the medical device, but the connection is more complicated for several reasons, Priscu says. First of all, inventions in this sector usually come from the doctors, who are relatively isolated from digitalization. It took time for medicine to realize that the connection had be created. Secondly, digital medical solutions are complicated strategically and in marketing, because the patient is not the one paying for them, and is not always the one making the decision to use the product, so the product has to provide value for everyone. Thirdly, Priscu says that it is sometimes hard to induce medical personnel to abandon the idea of a patient being just a collection of measures. People working in design, on the other hand, constantly think about the user experience, not just the result.
"When a medical devices company comes to Zemingo, we ask two questions: what the business targets are, meaning what they want to happen, and who is the target market," Friscu says. "In the next stage, we really draw the patient's movement within the process, like a storyboard for a movie or an advertisement. On this basis, we design the interface, which is like a car tire - it's not the most expensive or most technological component in the car, but if it isn't good, the car won't grip the road. If the interface is no good, the product won't grip the customer."
Beware of interfaces
Priscu gives an example of a product by the Theranica company recently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Theranica has developed an electrical stimulation system for prevention of migraines, based on therapeutic patches that communicate with a digital interface. "In the planning of this product, there are special considerations for the medical sector that don't exist with other products. For example, you can't create a product based solely on management by telephone; what would you do if the battery runs out, or if the connectivity between the components fails? You have to find a way in which even if the telephone initializes the action and monitors it, the chip on the patch still manages the action from beginning to end, and it can be turned off without the telephone," Priscu explains. What does the app do besides initializing the action? It documents the treatment, recommends improvements, tests the level of compliance, and reports to the doctor.
One of the ways of creating value for users is to design an interface that is like a game, but Priscu says that you have to be careful with this. "The game shouldn't always be put up front as the main purpose of the app. It can damage the product's values. For example, Theranica didn't do gamification, because a patient wants to feel that he or she is in serious hands, and gets value by using the product in any case. Gamification isn't very significant in generating motivation," Priscu says.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on January 21, 2020
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