Myabetes

Myabetes is an incognito way of monitoring and managing diabetes right from your smart watch.

This was a two-week long General Assembly project in the middle of my UXDI class that I did on a team with 2 other people. Our prompt was basically: look at these Medtronic devices and make something good for people with Diabetes.

Through some initial interviews of diabetics, we found a common pain point was social awkwardness around checking blood glucose and injecting insulin. Diabetics didn't want to have to do these things in social situations, like going to lunch or happy hour with coworkers and getting questions about "that ugly pager thing you're typing in". Often, they simply didn't check or inject at the appropriate times, leading them to have glucose spikes and crashes, which is really bad for health in the long-term. Our friends with diabetes need an easy way to own their condition and feel good about taking care of themselves.

So we took a hard look at the essential tasks involved in simply going out to lunch as a diabetic and set out to make it better. We chose to build for a watch platform for two reasons: 1 although it will be novel for a short while (eliciting questions about the technology in the near future), wearables are likely to integrate into daily life more seamlessly than handheld devices in the long run. 2 sometimes in social situations, it will be preferable to operate the device without looking at it. Since the watch is always attached to your arm in the same orientation, has a small screen and is capable of haptic feedback, it is possible to design the flow in such a way that the user can perform a simple, frequently performed task without actually looking at the screen. Haptic feedback at different stages informs the user they are on track.

How it works: The apple watch will connect with the user's insulin pump and blood glucose (BG) monitor via bluetooth, allowing the user to see their BG with a quick glance at their watch. If they are about to eat or if their number isn't where they'd like it to be, they swipe the BG readout icon on the home screen to initiate a quick inject flow. The app has already calculated (based on the user's past ratios) a recommended dosage, which can be altered directly or through additional input of estimation of carbs in the upcoming meal. Then it's just a matter of confirming dose, a safety check, and the injection starts through the pump.

Working on this project in our team of three was an absolute joy, I had a blast every step of the way. I think the main reason that we were so successful with this was that all of us put our egos aside when coming up with ideas and testing them. Nobody was particularly attached to anything, so that as soon as any data showed we were wrong, we just threw that part out & re-evaluated. My teammate David said it best: "I've never had so much fun being wrong in my life!" We brought our final design back to many of our initial interviewees and they loved it. It was just a practice project, but we're actually talking about maybe packaging it nicely as we build our portfolios and sending it to Medtronic as something for them to consider moving toward.

Built With

• invision
• omnigraffle
• sketch