BRIEF_
Working in a team we had to develop a person/patient-centred healthcare application that makes use of the printed sensors to encourage healthy sleep patterns with support from Closed Loop Medicine & CPI.
BACKGROUND RESEARCH_
To answer the problem space of ‘how can printed sensors nurture healthy sleep patterns and promote well-being?’ we framed it by researching sleeping conditions, current products/services available and sleep scenarios. Conducting this research helped us gain insights into possible solutions. One of this main insights was according to the NHS (2018 [online]) there is a need for new national guidance managing insomnia using non-drug treatment.
This made us look into non-drug treatments and what became transparent was most conditions were caused or effected by a person’s sleeping habit, such factors as what you eat and drink, amount of exercise, how much technology you used before bed and how you spend your evenings (Knott, 2017). With this insight we looked into current products and services available, it became apparent that there was lack of non-drug treatments.
With this in mind we conducted sleep scenarios that involved different audiences such as young adults, pregnant women, older people. This helped us to pick our target audience, which we decided was parents of young children, as we know how important a child’s health is to every parent.
We conducted a questionnaire with 56 participates to gain insights from our chosen target audience. We found that 45% of parents gave their child an electronic device to help them go to sleep, however, research states it can cause health problems and does not help children to sleep instead it stimulates them (Scutti, 2016).
TARGET AUDIENCE_
Parents of children (0-10 year olds).
BIG IDEA_
Our idea is to educate parents about their children’s sleeping habits by monitoring their child and the environment by printed sensors through child friendly objects. There are four main components to our final idea they are the Lavandula App, Night Light and PJs.
LAVANDULA APP - is a bedtime routine app that helps parents identifies any sleep problem/s with their child’s routine and advises them how to get their child into a healthy routine. The App would be comprehensive and easy to use, with no confusing terminology.
USER JOURNEY_
NIGHT LIGHT - would have printed sensors that would monitor the environment, recording movement, noise levels and temperature of the room. The recorded data would be displayed on the Statistics Section of the Lavandula App.
PJS - would also have printed sensors that would monitor the child's sleep state, recording movement, heart beat variability (HRV), respiration rate and body temperature. We wanted the use of printed sensor to be embedded into none intrusive objects, so it did not disturb the user.
TEAM_ Pearl Wen, Rebecca Kelly, Eunice Sy Qiu and Iam Nune.
