ResMed is a medical equipment company that manufactures medical devices to treat respiratory conditions, such as sleep apnea and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Problem: People with sleep apnea need multiple pieces of special equipment to sleep soundly at night, but in order for that equipment to be as safe and effective as it should be, the patient must clean and maintain it themselves, as well as keep track of what needs to be replaced when.

Solution: We created a new mobile service for ResMed to offer its patients. By leveraging a smart phone’s native capabilities and incorporating emerging technologies to collect and use relevant data, our solution helps patients successfully clean and keep track of their multiple pieces of equipment. It also provides ResMed useful business data and a greater opportunity to fulfill their mission of delivering life-changing products and health solutions.

ResMed is a product-centric company that is looking to further expand into digital services. Our challenge was to innovate on our client’s offerings by exploring new technologies and designing a mobile service that augments its existing product offerings, creates value, and meets the needs of stakeholders.

While our team of four worked through all stages of the design process together, I took the lead in several meetings to ensure we were staying on track and focusing our solution towards our project goals. I also led the writing of our pitch and ensured the interactions to operate our live prototype worked correctly.

> Aditi Dhabalia
> Piper Hayden
> Emily Zou

None of us had any prior knowledge of or experience with sleep apnea and other respiratory conditions. In order to understand the client and the problem space, we started with secondary research. We looked at ResMed’s website and press releases to learn about ResMed and their goals, as well as online sources such as the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic to learn about sleep apnea and its requirements.

Through our research, we discovered there were five key players in the respiratory conditions space: patients, healthcare providers, caretakers, businesses, and the government.

We then created a stakeholder map to synthesize our research and visualize the actions, roles, and value being exchanged between the key stakeholders.

After getting a sense of the domain, we wanted to understand our users better. We spoke with a sleep apnea patient caregiver to get a sense of what it’s like for someone living with sleep apnea. We learned that maintaining their equipment, from keeping track of replacement dates to cleaning it everyday, requires a huge amount of effort and cognitive load.

We realized this pain point could be a design opportunity.

As we started to ideate, we decided to specify what we wanted the tone and voice of our solution to be. Since it’s a service that manages people’s important health information, we decided it should be credible, caring, and informative.

Our first few ideas revolved around how we could help people manage and keep track of their equipment replacement dates and sleep apnea related appointments. Our first sketches and initial wireframe reflect this line of thinking.

After an initial round of feedback, we realized that our solution of a task management app was not particularly innovative, and that we weren’t fully taking advantage of all a mobile phone could do. We knew we had to change direction. Since we were building a mobile service, we focused our solution on leveraging phones’ native capabilities to collect and use data. We also wanted to narrow our scope from everything equipment-related to just cleaning, to ensure we were doing one thing well and bringing real value to our users. The calendar and task management feature that was central to our initial idea moved to the background, and now only plays a role in equipment-related tasks that are based on the data collected about the equipment itself.

This pivot brought us to our final solution. By leveraging the phone’s camera and other native capabilities, implementing sensors on the equipment itself, and incorporating AR technology, our solution can collect data about the state of all of a patient’s equipment in order to:

1. help patients effectively clean their equipment

We pitched this to other designers as if we were pitching directly to our client. I helped outline the pitch, wrote my own part, and edited the script as a whole. I also contributed to the pitch deck by preparing my own section and then editing the full deck. Finally, I helped prepare the prototype and operated it live during the presentation.