Research and UX Design
ResMed Respironics sponsored Carnegie Mellon University for a mobile service transformation project. Here’s our concept Lumo. A non-intrusive pre-diagnosis system for kids and their family delivered via a mobile app. Although the sleep solution market for adults is saturated, 8-10% of children today who suffer from sleep apnea remains mostly undiagnosed.
ResMed
2 Months
Calir Sun - UX & Research
Fengyi Zhang - Research
JY Park - Research
Project Lead
UX Design & Research
Storyboarding
Diagnosing sleep apnea in children is an akward and expensive process. Sleep Apnea is a sleep disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep. Approximately 10% of children and 26% of adults suffer from Sleep Apnea. However, 90% will remain undiagnosed.
A child getting tested in a sleep lab.
Traditionally, sleep labs are used to diagnose sleep apnea, but very few people want to undergo the experience. Today, many low-cost early detection methods come in the form of home tests and mobile apps, but both have been proven to disturb sleep regularity.
Blue light disturbs circadian rhythm.
Background Information:
It’s when your body is not getting enough oxygen while it sleeps. This usually occurs because your airway is blocked. It sounds like loud snoring.
ResMed Inc. is a company that makes medical equipment for people struggling to breathe while sleeping. They’ve been doing this since 1989.
Continous Positive Air Pressure (CPAP) Machines are used to prevent your airway from collasping on itself.
Market Oppurtunity
After customer discovery, our team decided to focus on the children’s Market. We found that sleep apnea affects 8% to 10% of children. Moreover, many conditions worsen as these children grow up undiagnosed. And yet there are not many effective interventions to address this problem. Our solution Lumo is a family-centred solution that helps parents track children’s sleep to prediagnose potential Sleep Apnea.
The (Modified) Continuum of Health – Mental Model by Phillips Health
How It Works
By leveraging existing microphones in our smart hom we can help families and especially kids create a healthier sleep habbit.
The system is designed to work with existing smart home speakers.
Key Feature 1
Works in the background with your smart speakers. If you do not own a smart speaker, your phone works as well.
Key Feature 2
Know when to get help. Lumo works in the background to warns you of any potential sleep abnormalities in your family.
Stakeholder mapping with a vague user at the center. Hmmm...
Key Insight
Through secondary research and conversation with ResMed, we found that one of the main goals is to raise people's awareness of Sleep Apnea and to diagnose more patients. To first understand ResMed structure, we first drew out a stakeholder map to define the value interchanging between them.
It’s 38 times amount of people in New York.
Of adults suffer from sleep apnea
Of people with obesity suffers from sleep apnea
Of children suffer from sleep apnea
Of people with sleep apnea remins undiagnosed
Although we did a lot of exercise to uncover our assumptions and biases, it was never obvious that we assume the user was an adult until we started making. The excersise wasn't useless, because doing these generative methods helped primed our team's culture for checking our bias.
50 assumptions about healthcare and its reversal.
Questioning the idea that patients need sleep doctors to determine their sleep problem.
Me doing a quick sequence model on the whiteboard before storyboarding
Lower diagnosis barrier by using phone camera to measure neck size.
“Why not just just a tape measurer? It’s less akward?”
After a quiz, guide user to a certified sleep sleep lab.
“I like the certified part, but why not just use Google Maps?”
Ambient diagnosis experience for children via an IoT lamp.
“I like it, but what if I don’t want to buy a lamp?”
Concept #1
This is the lowest hangest fruit. Neck size is highly correleated with sleep apnea. Turns out the ergonomics of doing this with a phone camera is just bad, plus you can just use a tape measuerer.
We roleplayed the wireframe and honestly the ergonomics of phone neck scanning were horrible.
Concept #2
After creating a sequence model and a wireframe, we realized that this domain of locating "certified sleep labs" is already captured by Google Maps. We were stuck.
Then we noticed something about the main characters of our storyboards...
We roleplayed the situation with our wireframes and Google seems own this territory.
Lesson Learned
This realization happened because by storyboarding our design solutions, we began to more clearly see how our main characters were always adults. By storyboarding, we made our bias visual and explicit and therefore correctible.
Simplified Say, Do, Make Model from Design Ethnography by me
We didn't have time for a full storyboard, so we thumbnail the idea and role-played for quick evaluation. Considering all member's in the family, we realized that kids made up a big part of the family and realized that our whole stakeholder diagram was focused on adults.
Thumbnail Sketch of IoT Lamp
To ensure the right flow, I began with grayscale wireframes. After the main flow is established, I handed off my wireframes to Claire for mid-fi interfaces. We collaborated on the color palette to ensure accesibility. And finally, I took charge of the hi-fi interfaces and animated our prototype with Principle.
Low Fidelity
Medium Fidelity
High Fidelity
– Client Feedback
Here's what I learned:
