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Design Challenge Part 2

FS8205: Human Centered Design

Zainab Mansoor, Arshnain Madan, Arusha Adnan, Fizza Ahmed, Sekou Bayo

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Client: Toronto Rehabilitation Institute

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Background

What is Diabetes?

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Before we get into solving a problem, it is essential to understand the root of the problem we are trying to solve.

Diabetes , simply put, is the inability of the body to regulate blood glucose or blood sugar.
When you eat, your body breaks down the absorbed food into glucose - which is a source of fuel for your cells.
Digestion and breakdown of food in the body creates glucose spikes, signalling to the pancreas to release insulin.
Insulin is a hormone that facilitates the entry of glucose into cells, which then allows the cells to carry out various processes.
Now, here is where the problem occurs: an individual develops diabetes when

Type 1 diabetes: insulin production is severely reduced or halted
Type 2 diabetes: cells stop responding to insulin or are desensitized

Overtime and if not regulated properly, diabetes can affect blood circulation to extremities, vision, and more.

Source for above information: (I have studied this condition many times for my undergraduate degree and this is all from my own knowledge - Zainab)

Additionally, 30% of Canadians are living with diabetes or prediabetes , and prevelance of diabetes worldwide has continued to grow over the years.(https://www.diabetes.ca/advocacy---policies/advocacy-reports/national-and-provincial-backgrounders/diabetes-in-canada)

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Background

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Live

interview

Photo diaries

Industry experts

User needs

statements

Key themes

Ideation

How might we … ideate a product that facilitates easier consumption of nutrition, enables safe and effective movement and creates more comfortable social interactions for diabetic patients?

I’ll get started with a run down of our design challenge so far and what we’ve learnt and gathered along the way.

Live, in-class interview with a diabetic patient
Photo diaries from expert users (diabetic patients)
Industry expert presentations (Toronto Rehab)
Creating user needs statements
Consolidating key themes (sticky notes) :

From the interview and photo diaries we found that nutrition, technology, and social interactions were key themes. From the industry experts we learnt about the lack of blood supply to the feet and found that movement and technology were key themes.

Ideation - conceptualizing and brainstorming a potential ideas! We generated many different product ideas for our key themes and then started to talk about what we were going to focus on. You’ll see more of this process as we move along!

Then it came down to our how might we statement

How might we - we had all these ideas running from the different themes we looked at, and we started to think of a solution … so our how might we statement is …

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User need statements

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User need statements

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Ideation

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Top Five

(IDEO, 2015)

Find Themes

(IDEO, 2015)

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Ideation

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Movement

Footcare

Nutrition

Awareness

Technology

AI

Food Tracker

Self

Educating

App

Game

Connect people app

As you can see here, these are the five themes we ended up with through our ideation process. We bagan to sketch some of the ideas that we agreed were our best ideas and sketching them out really gave us a better idea of how we may go about executing each idea. I will briefly go over the sketches. Under movement we have custom made diabetic footwear, a new and improved diabetic kit, and a shirt with a closure which makes it easier to inject insulin. Under foot care we thought of a safety nail kit which exposes only the nail and a specialized glucose sensing sock. For nutrition we thought of an AI to track food intake. For technology we have a discreet band-aid style glucose sensor, a sports bra with sensors, a sweat sensing customizable arm band, and a cuff to cover existing glucose sensors. Lastly for awareness we thought of creating a self-awareness app for newly diagnosed patients, a game which aims to raise awareness on diabetes, and an app which connects people with diabetes to each other so they can share and learn from each other.

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Selection

NOW-HOW-WOW Matrix & Dot Voting

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How – ideas that are innovative, but difficult to implement
Now – represents unoriginal ideas which are familiar
Wow – represents new ideas that are easy to implement

Ease of implementation

Originality

(Kowalski, 2018), (IDEO Field Guide, 2015)

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Four Categories

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(Interaction Design Foundation, 2020), (IDEO Field Guide, 2015)

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Final Idea

An application that automates the process of calculating nutrition, testing glucose, and injecting insulin

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All images on this slide are attribution free from pexels.com

After all the ideation and voting on which product would best help our users, we decided on an application that automates the process of calculating nutritional value, testing the user’s glucose, and injecting insulin

To calculate carbohydrates from a meal, users would simply have to take pictures of their meal. Our app would include an AI trained to make estimation of carbohydrates off images of your food, limiting the user’s input to a couple of images

This would then be used to calculate the user’s required insulin based off multiple other data points: the user’s current glucose levels, their weight and other relevant physical data, their recent physical activity, and of course their previous input into the app that trained it

After calculation, the ai would send the information to the user’s insulin pump to dispense the correct amount, and would continue to monitor the user without input to alert them to any potential needed corrections to raise glucose levels, or administer additional insulin if needed, eliminating need for user involvement as much as possible.

One of the disadvantages of such a system is something I already mentioned, which is that the user would have to train the app to know how to best manage their insulin intake. Since this process is so specific to each person, it would be impossible and irresponsible for the AI to suggest the correct amount of insulin based on data points from other people, and so it would likely have to be trained by the user in the first usage period, but this would ideally be styled similarly to how the user already inputs and tracks their information and data.

Another disadvantage would be the amount of technology the user would need. Our app would ideally work with all types of sensors and pumps, but the user will still require this. However, we feel that users that would benefit from this app are already looking for ways to automate their process, and would likely already have these technologies, or be willing to or in the process of acquiring them.

(recent physical activity through phone pedometer, user input, or fitness tracking device)

https://techxplore.com/news/2019-09-foodtracker-ai-powered-food-mobile-application.html < example of AI detecting food that works // accuracy of 80% in 2019, AI has come a long way from then and we would train our AI much more.

Lu, Y., Stathopoulou, T., Vasiloglou, M. F., Pinault, L. F., Kiley, C., Spanakis, E. K., & Mougiakakou, S. (2020). goFOOD^TM: An Artificial Intelligence System for Dietary Assessment. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 20(15), 4283. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20154283 << peer-reviewed article about developing an accurate AI detection through images (two images or a short video); can easily be played off as taking images for social media if uncomfortable

Images:

https://www.pexels.com/photo/crop-woman-taking-shot-of-food-on-mobile-phone-during-lunch-4552130/

https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-girl-wearing-a-onesie-holding-an-insulin-pump-7653645/

https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-continuous-glucose-monitor-on-a-girl-s-arm-7653123/

https://www.pexels.com/photo/marketing-businessman-person-hands-6801872/

https://www.pexels.com/photo/smartphone-with-calculator-app-showing-total-amount-4386293/

https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-shot-of-a-black-glucometer-beside-a-syringe-8669957/

https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-person-recording-his-blood-sugar-reading-6942256/

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References

IDEO.org. (2015). The Field Guide to human-centred design. Retrieved March 29, 2023, from https://www.ideo.org/perspective/the-field-guide-to-human-centered-design

Lu, Y., Stathopoulou, T., Vasiloglou, M. F., Pinault, L. F., Kiley, C., Spanakis, E. K., & Mougiakakou, S. (2020). goFOOD^TM: An Artificial Intelligence System for Dietary Assessment. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 20(15), 4283. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20154283

Przybylek, Adam & Kowalski, Wojciech. (2018). Utilizing online collaborative games to facilitate Agile Software Development. 811-815. 10.15439/2018F347.

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