Awards

Awarded Gold for the 2018 ADCC Student Competition
Quarry Award for UX Design
John St for Strategic Design - Honourable Mention

Problem

In Canada, roughly 600,000 children under the age of 12 are affected by asthma and even with multiple solutions, only about 50% of them know how to use their inhalers properly. As a result, parents have to purchase addition equipment to aid their children through the process of taking their medication—such as an air chamber. Although these additional pieces are beneficial, they also brings challenges along with it:

• Air chambers are not only big and bulky, but it creates additional part that the kids have carry around

• Hard to know when the medication runs out. Not changing the medication on time can potentially lead to fatal incidents

• Children may feel embarrassed having to carry and or use an inhaler in public.

Design Challenge

How might we design a product for childhood asthma that is not only easy to use, but also empowers confidence in children to regularly take their medications, while helping parents with managing their kid's condition on an daily basis?

Solution

Oble is an easy to use, friendly, smart inhaler designed for children that combines the standard inhaler with the spacer into a single product. With it's companion app, Oble can help assist children taking their medication more efficiently without any prior assembly, and is embedded with Bluetooth technology that allows parents to track the device's usage and how well their child is doing every day.

Initial Research

To develop a better understanding of the challenges and struggles that accompany asthma, we wanted to hear from those who experience close interaction with it. Those such as parents, pharmacists, doctors as well as other individuals who have been effected by the issue.

From these small interactions, we gained valuable insight into the daily struggles faced with having and caring for those who have asthma. These were our main findings

After consolidating our findings from our user interviews, secondary research, and our competitor analysis, our team created a pact analysis and user personas to better illustrate what we are dealing with. This ultimately help us pinpoint what the current market was lacking, as well as what we can do to create a better solution.

Ideation

After multiple iterations of sketches and prototypes—as well as receiving feedback from our peers, parents and professors, we collectively finalized a product design that ultimately targets all of the problems areas that we wanted to resolve.

When the physical product of Oble reached a good state of quality and functionality, we started to establish what was needed in the application. Based on the information that we gathered from our interviews with pharmacists and parents, we identified some key goals:

• Simple

  Creating an experience that is easy and understandable for all users to comprehend

• Safe and Secure

  Bring reassurance to users about the safety of their children health

• Informative

  Keeps users informed about any troubles or issues their children maybe be facing

• Manageable

  Provides the ability to observe the progression of their childs asthma

Design System

With our product targeting a younger demographic, we wanted to create a friendly and approachable application that kids would love and parents could trust. Thus we incorporated light tones of blue and coral, soft and playful illustrations, and made it as simple as possible to make the user feel at ease.

Final Product

Oble is a friendly inhaler that allows children to take their asthma medication without worry of being looked down upon. Instead of feeling insecure about having asthma, they can get the right treatment confidently, whether at school, home or anywhere else they go.