- Cases
- Kenya, India, South Africa, Senegal
Designing with the Frontline: Reimagining Sepsis Detection for Newborn Survival
01 Situation
Neonatal sepsis remains a leading cause of newborn deaths across low-resource settings. Challenge Works, with LifeArc, launched the Newborn Survival Prize to tackle this crisis. The research brief: understand how sepsis is currently managed, and where frontline health workers—often undertrained and under-resourced—need support.
02 Assignment
Proportion Global was tasked to uncover context-specific insights and co-develop criteria for innovations that could be scaled through the prize. The goal was to ground the challenge design in the lived realities of healthcare workers in Kenya, India, South Africa and Senegal.
03 Approach
Native HCD researchers led in-country interviews across levels of care—from overwhelmed referral hospitals to rural posts run by matrones. Tools such as journey mapping, contextual inquiry, and facilitated prototyping helped surface critical gaps: diagnostic delays, limited training, poor tool usability, and affordability constraints.
04 Result
Insights reframed the challenge toward “early detection and rapid triage by non-specialists.” Respondents co-endorsed ideas like offline risk score calculators, visual SOPs, and wearable vital sign alerts—if tools remain simple, solar-powered, and reusable. The final prize design now reflects those frontline-defined realities.
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