Heart Disease PSA Project

Heart Disease PSA ~ Project

1. Empathize

Heart disease is a terrifying reality for many people around the world. Anyone can amass risk factors; even if you don’t smoke, and lead a healthy life, a family history can still add to your risk of contracting Heart Disease. Unfortunately, a striking number of these people are women. Heart Disease kills more women per year breast cancer or cervical cancer. In fact, Heart Disease kills more women per year than all cancers combined. With nearly 1 in 4 people dying of Heart Disease per year, it’s no surprise that people are looking to find anything they can do to stop the crusade of this disease. Thus, for this project, my group and I were responsible for creating a prototype that would help people stop heart disease.

 Image by Hayley Grassler

2. Define

One of the leading causes of heart disease is smoking. Smoking definitively and significantly raises a person’s risks for contracting heart disease. People who smoke are 2 to 4 times more likely to contract heart disease than someone who does not. Smoking causes heart disease because the nicotine that is found in cigarettes and makes them incredibly addictive also has further negative side-effects. Nicotine hardens the blood vessels in and around the heart making it harder for blood to flow, raises blood pressure and heart rate, makes blood more prone to clotting and increases the buildup of plaque within arteries. All of these are things that steeply increase the likely-hood of getting a heart attack or a stroke. Both of these can, and often do, kill people. Smoking is so detrimental that every single cigarette that is smoked puts the smoker closer to a heart attack. On the bright side, the risk for heart disease decreases by two times only 1 year after the smoker has stopped smoking.

So, obviously it is important to help smokers stop smoking. Smoking is a highly addictive habit, so any resources that are available to help keep  someone on track should be used.

 Images by Hayley Grassler

3. Ideate

In order to help people stay on track, Yasmeen and I created a system that will remind smokers daily to stay on the right track, working towards their goal of being independent from nicotine. We were brainstorming and realized that a calendar with daily reminders to stay strong could be motivational for many people. Also on this calendar are suggestion to help distract the participant from picking up the habit again. This calendar is downloadable, so anyone with a Google account can download it and use it.

The second product we created was a lighthearted yet informational quiz. This quiz was designed to help people who were thinking about quitting cross over the commitment line and stop smoking for good. It provides information like how long it takes to break a habit and what the benefits are to stopping smoking. The quiz is very brief so that it can be taken quickly to provide a quick motivation boost.

4. Prototype

We condensed our prototypes onto a separate WordPress site so that it can be updated, and so that the products can we found and used together. We titled the site “Heart Disease Help”. It can be found here. On this page, we uploaded a little quiz about how it can be beneficial to stop smoking, and that we were hoping would serve to be a little tool to remind people who are trying to stop smoking throughout their day to not smoke. The online and technological aspects of this product would be helpful to young women, because younger women are highly likely to turn to the internet for help. The American Lung Association shows that although smoking in women has been on the decline for the past 2 decades, smoking in young women from about 18-25 is increasing slightly. This could be a result of current celebrities, like Lana Del Ray, glorifying smoking, or certain social-media outlets, like Tumblr, posting pictures that make smoking seem elegant, cool and edgy.

5. Test

In order to test the prototype, we needed people. Luckily for us, my mother had been an emergency room nurse for 15 years and had dealt with many people who were either heavy chain-smokers and people who had smoked for years and were trying to quit. I was also lucky enough to have my neighbor, Jay, who just recently quit smoking after smoking 2 packs per day for 25 years. Both of them very kindly took the time to look over and evaluate the products. My mother said that part of her responsibilities as a nurse were to ensure that she was reminding her patients daily not to smoke, and to check up on them to make sure they had not fallen off the wagon. She said that she felt it would be very effective to have something online so that it is easily available to people. She also liked that the calendar gave alternate options to smoking, and that the quiz was “quick yet poignant”.

Jay was very helpful as well. He said that since he had just gone through the process, he could tell us that online sites were very helpful for him because he generally has 9 hour workdays, which didn’t leave much time to talk to an actual person or make appointments to go to a help group. He took the quiz, and he said that it would be a “witty reminder of a difficult truth”. Jay said that the calendar was a great idea because reminders could be timed to go off in the morning, which was when he and many others felt the greatest craving for a cigarette, and it could have been the little blip of motivation that some people need to continue onwards with their goal.

 Image by Hayley Grassler

We found our informations from the linked paged of these sites:

The CDC

The American Heart Association

WebMD

Medline Plus – Heart Disease in Women

Change is possible!