Mobile ethnography means no delays to the PoTS LIVE charity project

The team at Origins Insights are excited to introduce PoTS LIVE, our pro bono mobile ethnography project. Remarkably, the project marches on with its fieldwork phase even with the current UK restrictions. Collaboration has been central to the project set-up as we have been working in conjunction with PoTS UK and a trainee clinical psychologist from Royal Holloway, University of London.

The project aims to understand the impact of living with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (PoTS), uncovering individual experiences by utilising mobile ethnography to remotely capture deep, emotive insights. PoTS is a chronic health condition that predominantly affects young women. It is a multisystem disorder that causes a wide range of symptoms which vary on a regular basis and can be triggered by a multitude of factors. As such, PoTS can be difficult to manage and affects many different areas of a person’s life such as their cognition, mobility and general wellbeing.

A few remarkable things to note from this project so far given the world we currently live in:

• Ethical approval achieved in 2 weeks
• Participant recruitment completed in 48hrs, with success achieved mainly as a result of social media awareness within the patient group
• Guidance and stimulus materials developed in just 14 days, which outside of pharma regulation is a useful benchmark
• All participants are utilising remote video capture enabling rapid fieldwork activation and completion
• Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is being deployed as this technique specifically aims to investigate individual’s experiences and how they make sense of this themselves

Watch out for the programme read out in early summer, so that PoTS UK and PoTS patients themselves can understand and educate, thereby improving disease management.

If you’d like to support our colleagues at PoTS UK, feel free to donate to their cause, every penny counts! Details can be found via Instagram.