Hira: Conversational AI Designed to Listen

In collaboration with UPMC’s Gynecologic Oncology department we created a female-centered AI support tool that addresses a common gap in care: giving patients a space to simply feel heard.

Problem

Women who have spent their lives as caregivers often feel unseen and under-supported when they become the ones in need of care— often surrounded by advice and reassurance when what they truly desire is to feel emotionally heard.

Solution

Turning moments of “ranting in the car” into context-rich health insights, just by speaking out loud.

Process

Using

Resurfacing questions, concerns, and feelings to create talking points when pre-appointment anxiety and brain fog make it hard to remember.

Automatically syncs with myUPMC to pull upcoming appointment date, time, provider, and location.

What makes it powerful is the Talking Points Nudge, which reminds users of key thoughts or questions they previously recorded, helping them advocate for themselves during the visit.

Intense pre-appointment anxiety and during-appointment brain fog make it difficult to clearly communicate symptoms, ask questions, or express emotional needs.

When stepping into the hospital, a gentle “haptic hug” reminds patients they’re not alone, powered by location and appointment data.

It’s not just about the data or technology utilized. It’s about how it makes people feel.

Enabling quick, thoughtful exchanges between patients and their support network, making it easy to share updates or encouragement without the pressure to respond.

Support Taps

Original problem framing: “Giving patients and caregivers the right information at the right time“

Shadowing —> inspired by women doctors, only 20 minutes per appointment, can’t rely only on doctors to provide emotional support at scale, conversations with them they get lots of messages after appointments for questions that forgot to get asked, brain fog and pre-appointment anxiety

Interested in ambient AI used in appointments for doctors like Pittsburgh’s own Abridge and Microsoft… what if we utilized similar technology for the patient

co-design —> I take care of everybody else and now I feel abandoned… my friends say it’ll be okay but they don’t understand my situation, I just want to be listened to. My doctors don’t listen to me and I get so frustrated I just want to rant into the void. Dogs are a great support, they provide their presence and can tell when you are down. They don’t try to fix situations, they just listen without judgement.

My impact —> strategic positioning of really leaning into female-centered care and how it’s a totally unique design direction …. often things are “designed for women” by making it pink… this is not that.

  • I really pushed our team to consider how deep the impacts were of what we’ve heard about women centered care

    • womens health is already overlooked, funding, etc. the care binder gyneoc patients receive had male genitalia in it as recently as 2022

    • even MORE overlooked because it is extra sensitive

    • We flipped the narrative around female-centered conversational AI and female centered care. While voice assistants like Alexa and Siri default to female voices—and issues like Scarlett Johansson’s lawsuit highlight oversexualization—we consciously challenged these norms for female users by designing an AI that focuses primarily on listening.

creatively engaging with deep human emotions and behaviors through unorthodox prototyping approaches

  • exploring objects

    • feeling objects blindfolded to evoke different feelings

  • research into “the hug“ by Jodi Forlizzi

  • research into “women communication and support styles“

  • feeling haptics ourselves