Eleara

Inspiration

Our discussion began with how sudden dizzy spells can disrupt daily life. Some of us had done so ourselves or personally knew someone who had experienced difficulty with sudden dizzy spells. These dizzy spells may occur at any time and may make normal activities, like standing, walking or driving, impossible for some people. As a team, we began researching balance and how it relates to the sensory systems of the body and how we experience dizziness. In doing so, we found that there will be an occurrence of dizziness when our brain receives conflicting messages from our vestibular system, vision systems and sensory systems from the body (how the brain receives motion information, any change of posture, or stability). Once we realized this, the next step was to come up with a product that could provide real-time information (monitoring) on the sensory systems of the body for the purpose of intervening before the perception of balance and dizziness becomes too difficult. This concept served as the framework for Eleara.

What it does

Eleara is an ear-worn system connected to a mobile application. The Eleara system utilizes sensors that allow the user to provide data on specific sensory measures related to balance (e.g. motion, posture, stability). The Eleara system processes this sensory data to detect the divergence of a user's balance sensory signals and to predict the likelihood of experiencing dizziness.

How we built it

We followed a systematic product development plan:

Defining the problem and developing ideas for solving it;
Creating wireframes that illustrate the layout and user paths;
Creating a visual style guide and a product requirements document (PRD) outlining our visual look and product requirements;
Rapidly prototyping the app–wearable interface;
Conducting usability and accessibility testing;
Making changes based on user testing to improve the clarity of controls and user experience;

Challenges we ran into

For many of us, this was out first experience at a hackathon, and so it took a effort to get into the correct mindframe and collaborate with one another in this fast pace project.
Designing an interface that is usable when the user has already experienced a sense of dizziness and/or disorientation.
Designing a product that seamlessly links together wearable technology with a mobile application

Accomplishments that we're proud of

An intuitive and simple to use mobile interface.
Modification from user feedback.
punctual and structured coordination between members.

What we learned

This project gave us first insights into what a fast paced work environment involving rapid prototyping and iterating with respect to user research and evidence, where every nre version not only needs to be better, but be better from reasoning.