Our Brief:
This project has been a journey of unfolding the experiences of cancer patients/survivors and healthcare professionals to navigate through complex systems to deliver patient-centred design.
The Challenge:
Cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer affects not just the body, but also the mind and spirit. It is important to take care of the holistic well-being of the patient.
Conventional treatment focuses on treating the illness in the physical body and comes with many severe side effects so much so that sometimes patients discontinue their treatment.
The Integrative care cancer approach helps manage these severe side effects to aid cancer patients in continuing with their treatment for faster recovery.
Our Major Insights:
1. Nutrition is an integral part of the Integrative care approach being the basic need and fuel for your body. A balanced nutritious diet boosts immunity and heals the mind, body & soul to recover from the side effects of treatment.
2. There is limited time and access to resources. Nutrition is expensive and doctors don’t always have a lot of time and are indifferent towards discussing other care options. This results in irrevocably late advice and also self-advocacy by patients.
3. There’s a dangerous amount of information available at a click on Dr Google and yet there's a lack of streamlined information for the patients and their nutrition.
4. The emotional trauma associated while approaching nutritional care is massive and due to the severe side effects that come with cancer treatment there is a disconnection in their relationship with food.
Our Service Proposition:
Introducing Dear Diet, a nutrition Hand holder for Colorectal Cancer patients. It is a nutritional data-driven platform that gives streamlined information and personalized recommendations, allowing emotional and experiential mapping associated with food. This will help create awareness at an early diagnosis stage by encouraging healthy and sustainable eating habits for patients. In addition, it will help them recognise their personal nutrition patterns helping them re-establish their relationship with food.
Impact of our Service Propositions:
Dear Diet hugely impacts the following stakeholders:
1. Cancer Patients: provides affordable nutrition advice minimizing the overwhelming anxiety and severe side effects throughout the treatment. It gives back their lost control, through symptom and pattern tracking helping them understand their individual nutrition needs.
2. Doctors, Nutritionists and Integrative Cancer Carers: help them dedicate more time to specific cases, enhance audience connection, and facilitate integrative care advocacy, fostering a healthy doctor-patient relationship so doctors can focus on treating cancer.
3. Medical Institutions & Research Centres: the collected data has the potential to aid future research and correlate food choices with clinical outcomes for all cancer types not just individually but also culturally. Medical professionals can access this data as electronic health records, which can be translated into reports using AI, facilitating a deeper understanding of each case's specificity.
Media attachments on this website:
- Image: Glimpse of a poster image to spread awareness
- Image: Glimpse of our Service Proposition
Please feel free to reach out to know more about the project.