StickiePrompt

Inspiration

Diabetes mellitus has increasingly become a major global health and development challenge of the 21st century. In the UK alone, 3.9 million people have been diagnosed with diabetes with only 40% of these patients meeting treatment targets. Besides, diabetes is associated with cardiovascular complications like peripheral vascular disease and strokes and other complications such as diabetic retinopathy, nephropathy and neuropathy. At the moment, the management of blood sugar levels requires diabetes patients to possess high levels of health literacy, motivation, and a commitment to lifestyle modifications. There are many lifestyle support tools for diabetes patients, some of which are digital. StickiePrompt differs from these as it is a straight-forward, low-tech solution that restructures the users’ environment to achieve behaviour change and improve adherence to blood glucose monitoring on the aggregate level.

What it does

StickiePrompt is a sticker that is placed across the door of home food storage units and confronts the user with the written question "Have you checked your blood glucose?". If the user does not interact with StickiePrompt before opening the door, the sticker plays a random sequence of beeps as a secondary confrontation. If the user presses the “YES” button to confirm the blood glucose check and opens the door, the speaker plays a celebratory melody. In this way, StickiePrompt nudges behavioural change and habit formation of monitoring blood glucose levels before preparing a meal.

How we built it

Building this prototype has been a very iterative process. The first round was, almost literally, back-of-napkin. Post-It notes and pens were used to envision the physical form factor of our product and get a sense of how users might interact with it. After the rough-drafts, Figma was used to digitally create a design which was transferred to paper with coloured sharpies and laminated with packing tape. That final feature-lite prototype was taped to a refrigerator and evaluated for base impact. While testing the feature-lite prototypes Arduino Nanos were used to bench test some of the features being considered. Once the features had been planned and coded on an Arduino and breadboard it was time to scale down and move to the MVP. Our MVP is currently a match-box sized circuit running on an AtTiny85 sitting behind a handcrafted sticker. This version is viable enough for us to gain useful insights from user testing and flexible enough for us to pivot quickly around those insights. The next step is to get it out to users!

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge to our idea is to balance the level of nudging with user-friendliness and demonstrate habit formation. During the prototype development, we have made consideration in this aspect and added one time-delay feature between alerts to the prototype. To assess the impact of StickiePrompt on improving the habit of blood glucose monitoring case studies with diabetes patients are required. Further, there may be a potential mismatch between the end-user and the purchaser of our product if we decide to sell directly to hospitals or other business groups to freely distribute our tool. In that event, we would have to demonstrate a higher level of confidence that a user will continue to use the product and attain positive results. If we sell directly to users marketing material will likely be more influential in the purchase of the product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As third prize winners of the EIT Health Innovation Hackathon 2020, we performed market research, created a user persona to characterize potential users, and interviewed potential users and subject matter experts to inform our idea formation. We have since created and tested an initial feature-light prototype for preliminary user testing. After successful testing, we worked with the Hackspace at Imperial College London to build a full feature prototype for planned larger-scale user testing to inform iterative refinement. Further, we have developed a phase-gated roadmap to commercialization inspired by medical device design control systems.

What we learned

We learned that diabetes mellitus places a high burden on patients and health systems and that adherence to medical treatment and monitoring is a major challenge for diabetes patients. Further, we learned that behavioural change is a complex undertaking, in particular regarding the effect of nudges. The challenge is to balance being annoying enough to make an impact and reasonable enough to ensure the use of StickiePrompt. As a diverse and multidisciplinary team, we learned a lot from each other's field of expertise, to evaluate our intervention from a different perspective and to effectively communicate and distribute tasks among ourselves.

What's next for StickiePrompt

Our path to implementing StickiePrompt continues by further using the resources of our universities such as connections with Imperial Enterprise Lab, Imperial Advanced Hackspace, and TUM Makerspace and by performing user testing to finalise the prototype. With a prototype in hand, we can involve networks like the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Diabetes UK to begin accessing potential users.

Built With

• arduino