Goal of the project

This project was approached as a hardware-software solution for the real time control and monitoring of diabetic people. For this, I worked on a fictional Philips-Apple partnertship to develop a bracelet, the hardware element, that comunicates with a software installed in your iPhone.

Defining the problem: first of all, what is diabetes?

Diabetes is… … a disorder in the metabolism and inappropiately high blood sugar that results from low levels of the hormone insuline or from abnormal resistance to insulin’s effects coupled with inadequate levels of insulin secretion to compensate.

… and requires - Strict control of your diet. - Periodical checks during the day. - Inject insuline to your body.

Defining the workflow

To communicate and report your reports. The software installed in the iPhone submits your constants periodically and, in case there’s something wrong, the doctor or his assistant gets an alert and contacts you in case they have to change your medication, give you advice or tell you about an urgent medical appointment.

This is the planned way of communication between patient and medical stuff.

What does the system has to do?

To give more importance to your medical notifications, the hardware device that delivers the insulin to you has to give you some feedback. This is necessary to avoid the possible confussion about phone notifications or notifications about your medical status.

For that reason, this device should:

Concept for the hardware element: the bracelet

How does it work?

The OK status displays the time and your glucose level on the screen of the bracelet and the LED remains green.

If something is going on, the bracelet vibrates, the LED becomes red and the screen only displays the icons related with the event happening to force you go and check the details in the screen of the iPhone. These events are:

• New appointment with your doctor.
• Medication updated.
• Request to perform an ECG test.
• Low battery or low level of insulin.
• Incoming call from your doctor.
• Low level of sugar in blood.

Working with the lo-fi prototype

To test the lo-fi prototype, I scanned the screenshots that were done in paper and uploaded them in the iPhone to test it on-screen.

After explaining the basics of the interface, I simulated some of the events that the bracelet comunicates to you to test the response of the users. All suggestions were noted and several changes were made before some other tests on different people to proceed working on the hi-fi prototype.

The mainscreen

This is the appearance of the mainscreen. The menu bar in the bottom of the screen lets you:

• Calling/receiving a call from your doctor: just in case you are not feeling well and it is something urgent.
• Send/receive a message: for non-urgent feedback to ask for an appointment or let them know how are you feeling.
• View logs of your measurements monitored during the last hours.
• View your medication schedule: it shows you the medication you need and the time you have to use it. It can be directly updated by your doctor.
• Calendar of appointments: It keeps you informed about your medical appointments.

At the same time, tapping on the values of the current glucose level, pulse and temperature, you go directly to the graphic logs of the last hours of the measurement tapped.

Communicating with the doctor

Reviewing your measurements