A Rare Disease Simulator for a Global Pharmaceutical Company
Raising Awareness of HAE Among HCPs
Hereditary Angioedema (HAE) is a debilitating disease which, due to its rarity and symptom variability, is often un- or misdiagnosed. This can have life-changing or life-ending results for patients.
Our client, a global pharmaceutical company, wanted to drive awareness of HAE among busy and bombarded healthcare providers. It was Genuine’s challenge to help them break through.
Bringing Home the Reality of a Rare Disease
Believing an experience that connected healthcare providers with the disease personally would instill empathy and lead to deeper engagement, further learning and, ultimately, improved outcomes, we built the HAE Simulator, first as a kiosk experience for conferences, later as a further-reaching in-browser experience.
HAE is characterized by swelling, often - and perhaps most arrestingly - of the face. Our kiosk experience was engineered to apply symptomatic swelling to the user’s own face, highlighting the symptoms of the disease in an unforgettable way. Built in Flash, the experience mapped the users’ facial features from a selfie and manipulated the photo to reflect an HAE attack. This photo could be printed or emailed, and it couldn’t be forgotten.
After the success of the kiosk, our clients wanted to create an in-browser version of the experience for use at a virtual forum held during COVID in late 2020. We brought the Flash experience into HTML leveraging displacement mapping to mimic the facial distortion of the disease, and created additional interactive content including a quiz and symptom map for those unable to use a webcam. New technology, same impact.
