GUBING WANG
HELLO I'M GUBING
I LOVE SOLVING PROBLEMS
Cambreathe
Problem Breifing
The Breathe Hackathon was the world’s first three-way global hackathon, held September 19-20 at Imperial College (UK), MIT (USA), and Technion (Israel). It brought together designers, technicians, engineers, patients, physicians and entrepreneurs to investigate solutions to the challenges faced by those with respiratory conditions. In two days, our team researched through the current technologies and identified the problem we want to solve, came up with the solution, prototyped and pitched it.
Interviews and insights
We have consulted a variety of individuals throughout our design process. Researchers, industry professionals, healthcare professionals, and a patient advocate. I am so surprised that COPD is the 3rd cause of death but have not received enough awareness as it should. I got to understand the patients from a psychologist point of view. Patients suffer from social stigma because they think it's their lack of discipline with smoking causes this disease. They also do not go to clinics as recommended by GPs because solely climbing stairs deters them from getting out of their home. We also received guidance from Havas Lynx, a healthcare communication company, in developing our concepts.
Two of my teammates are sufferers of asthma, and they shared their experience with monitoring their peak flow; they are given a purely mechanical peak flow meter and a paper diary to record the readings each time, and bring this diary to their next GP appointments. The paper can be lost easily and it is not uncommon to forget to record the reading once or twice, thus, the result is not very reliable. They find using the meter in the public is a bit embarrassing as well. Having two potential users will be a big advantage for our group if we go forward with tackling asthma, therefore, we decided to go against the mainstream in the hackathon (i.e. COPD) and decided to design a 21st Century Peak Flow Meter, Cambreathe.
My task involves: contribute to brainstorming, information gathering, concept selection
Final design
The main features of the design are portable, user-engaging, able to share data via Bluetooth and store data, potentially identify the links between several daily factors with peak flow rate. The core technologies are the Mass Flow Meters by Sensirion, Arduino circuits and IBM's Cloud Platform, Bluemix.
I came up with two device designs as shown below. Both are one-piece designs, which reduces user errors; e.g. the mouthpiece cover will not be lost for hygiene reasons. The concept behind the second design is what I call "Healthcare Accessories". I want the patients to be proud of their medical devices rather than embarrassed, which is one cause of the inadequate patient compliance. When a patient regards his/her device as a toy, he/she will find using the device is same as playing a game, and this device makes him/her unique rather than different.
Before taking a reading, the patient is prompted to answer several simple questions about their sleep, activity level and diet on the device UI. Then the patient takes the reading. The reading and answers are automatically recorded in the memory disk embedded in the device and also transmitted via Bluetooth to the phone and stored in the Cloud. Graphs are automatically plotted and the links will potentially be identified using Big Data methodologies. Patients can select to keep the data to themselves, or share with their GPs, or with the community.
We chose the Mass Flow Meters by Sensirion due to its excellent repeatability, fast response time and robustness; and Bluemix because it has a broad portfolio of capabilities.
My task involves: came up with potential hardware designs of Cambreathe and present them using sketches; CAD modelling
Prototyping
Due to limitation of time, only the first design is 3D printed using Ultimaker 2 with PLA. The graphical interface and branding is designed using PowerPoint.
Key learnings
It is the fastest design process I have ever experienced, and the first time I began to look at the design from an entrepreneur point of view. We did market research at the start, to see if there is a real need of the patients. However, this does not mean we only consider about dollars when we are doing our design, we keep thinking about how to make the device intuitive and elegant to use throughout the process. One thing we should improve on is maintaining the width of our scope while increasing its depth. We got more focused on the two asthma patients in our team and their experiences. They haven been using pen and paper for peak flow monitoring, and we take for granted this is the best way they can find so far. After the hackathon, we figured out there are actually several types of digital peak flow meters, even though the USP of our device is user-centred, our concept is not as novel as we previously thought. In the end, I got the chance to network with other designers, engineers and venture capital investors and received feedbacks about our design.