‘C-Vein’, Design case study of a vein viewer

9 min readMay 5, 2019

“Can there be anything more dreadful than getting a needle shot in a hospital?”

“Yes, getting multiple pricks all along your elbow because the nurse is unable to find your veins”.

A common ordeal that a large population face every time they have to get their blood tests done, intake medicines or donate blood.

Discovery of problem

During one of the field visits to a blood donation camp, I observed that many donors were rejected and sent back because the nurses couldn't find their veins.

“We can’t keep pricking the donor’s hands multiple times to find the veins, if we don’t find them easily, we send the donors back” — Nurse in a blood bank.

Not being able to find veins to retrieve blood leads to a huge loss in the amount of blood that could have been potentially collected.

Wrong kind of venipuncture (process of needle insertion in the vein) could lead to swelling, rashes, black spots and skin scars. This is common occurrence in children and patients who are deep veined, obese and dark skinned.

My goals in doing this project

Test my ability to handle a challenging project which tested my product design and UX design skills.
To use design process as a tool and find a solution to a widely prevalent problem.
Practice conducting and analysing user research, create user journeys, wireframes, prototypes, test and refine the solution.

The roles I assumed during the process are :

User Researcher
Data Analyst
UI/UX Designer
Product Designer

( I have articulated the article in two distinct parts — a. The product design of a tangible solution and b. UX design of a mobile based solution)

Who are the target audience?

The primary users of the application are the medical fraternity who would be directly performing the venipuncture process, such as lab technicians, nurses and doctors.

The secondary users for whom the solution is made for and will be used upon are -

Obese patients
Geriatrics
Children
Patients with deep veins

User Research and Data collection (n=34)

A field research was done on clinics and hospitals in Mumbai, where nurses doctors and patients with deep veins were interviewed and given well thought out questionnaires.

Frequency of difficulty faced in finding veins

During the research it was observed that he preferred methods used to spot the vein were :

Feel the veins with fingers
Using Traction belts
Trial and error

Although difficulty in finding the correct vein is a pervasive issue faced by medical fraternity, ‘trial and error’ seems to be the most commonly used method.

Affordability of vein detector solution

Existing solutions in the market like Braun’s Vein Viewer provide high quality images of veins, but these devices are very expensive often costing lakhs of rupees. Even the multi-specialty hospitals are hesitant on investing huge sums on these devices and instead rely on the expertise of their personnel to spot the veins.

During the market survey, I had met a doctor in a small sub urban clinic. When asked if he faces issues in finding veins — he said ‘Yes’, when asked if he would buy a device that could solve the problem — he said ‘Yes’, (with a beaming happiness in his eyes) but when I told him the probable price of such device, his instant reply was -

“I’d rather prick the patient multiple times and find the correct vein, instead of buying such an expensive device”.

The solution needed to be extremely affordable (read as ‘almost free’) for clinics to adopt and use it on patients. It was important to leverage on existing devices and eco-system to realise an effective and economical vein detector solution.

Acceptance of mobile application as a solution

A device which has the highest penetration in urban and rural areas is the Mobile phone, the conversion rate of feature phone to smartphone users is also on an exponential rise. The second leg of survey had questions based on a vein detector solution that is based out of mobile phone, expectedly the acceptance of a mobile app based solution was very high, the few respondents who were hesitant to using a mobile phone were the feature phone users.

Design Brief

Based on the research insights and landscape study, the design brief was framed as ‘To design a low cost, infrared vein detector that is -

Solution is easy to use after minimal training
Needs to be portable and have less maintenance
Affordable (Price range below Rs 2000/-)
Works effectively on diverse users (Dark skinned, obese, children, etc)

Design Process I followed

The fundamental design process has three main parts — ‘Empathise’, ‘Ideate’ and ‘Deliver’ keeping the user at the centre of focus throughout the process. Individual steps and nuances under each of these verticals differ, it primarily depends on nature and needs of a project. Following is the pictorial representation of the design process I followed in this specific project.

Brainstorming and Ideation

During ideation phase my electrical engineering background came in handy as I was able to explore and ideate not only from product design perspective, but also the technical aspects (for instance, exploring various LED circuit configurations).

Based on ergonomic data of human hands, various mockups of the device were 3-D printed and tested on users. the feedback of comfort of usage and ease of learning were considered for further refinements.

Final product

Phase 2 of C-Vein

As a sole designer of the product, I knew the product in and out. With the wide acceptance of the product, I started to observe an important feedback from few of the users. Since the product was used in contact with the skin, I had proposed ways of cleaning the contact surface and take care of the hygiene issues (Using isopropyl alcohol to clean the surface and use a silicon sleeve to cover the surface), but few doctors gave me a feedback that they found it tedious to clean the surface and put the sleeve for every veni-puncture.

While majority of the users were fine with the cleaning protocol, I thought of building the next upgraded version of C-Vein.

If you don’t Cannibalise your own product, someone else will — Steve Jobs

For the next product I wanted to have a ‘non-contact’ solution to view the veins. This is where the research came in handy, where using Mobile phone as a modality for viewing veins was widely accepted. So I started exploring the possibilities of realising the app based solution.

Collaboration with MIT Media Labs
When I got an opportunity to collaborate with MIT Media Labs on a Sleep Apnea project as a Product designer I readily accepted it (Details about the Sleep Apnea project will be described in an upcoming blog), in one of the MIT’s workshop discussions I proposed the idea of using mobile phone camera and an additional clip on IR module to view veins. After initial feasibility discussions the technical aspects of the project was taken care by engineers of MIT Media Labs, I decided to work on the UX of the mobile application as a side project.

Back to drawing board

Mobile app based Vein Viewer Concept

The new concept will have the C-Vein application installed in the mobile phone and an external attachable IR module will be on the mobile phone’s camera, when needed the camera and IR module is turned on through the application.

IR vein image on mobile would help in performing errorless venipuncture process

Prototype Testing

Paper prototypes were used along with a working mobile setup to get the initial feedback from the users.

The key metrics considered for evaluation were —

Satisfaction Rate
Usability Rate
Error Rate

Parameters that were specifically observed were — Onboarding experience, understand the intuitiveness of key flows and hierarchy of information on screens.

Refinement based on feedback

Based in the feedback from prototype testing, the expanse of information shown upfront was refined, less used features were put in deeper layers and the most used ones were made more big and bold. This iterative process was carried out till no major issues or improvement areas were perceived.

Information Architecture

From the feedback received from users, it became imperative that the method of showing them intuitive ways of navigation and performing different functions are important. This can encompass everything including the default language used on the app (considering vast majority if users are native language speakers in rural areas), the menu, the organisation of screens, overall app structure and how it’s all set up together to make sense to the user for easy navigation.

Making an Information Architecture (IA) precisely helps us in doing that, it helps the app to be set up in a way that makes sense to the user, so that no or minimal effort is needed to perform an action on the app. Content should feel laid out in a logical manner and sorting through it should be easy.

Wireframes and detailing

Low fidelity wireframes were made to implement the outcome of the IA in a mobile screen format, finer details (screens for T&C and Privacy policy) were omitted and main screens which are used most often were laid out.

Mood board

Mood boards help in creating the artistic direction of the project. The objective of the mood board here is more about exploring tone and mood.

Pastel shades of green and orange was considered to make the experience less intimidating, also bringing in the feeling of freshness and warmth while using the product.

High fidelity screens

Reflections on the project

For a designer getting to meet actual users and understanding the nuances of their problems is the best way to empathise with them and there can be no substitute for it.

The biggest take aways for me in this project were :

Realising the hunger I had for building end to end design solutions
The joy of getting complex things done while working with a team who had diverse areas of expertise.
Adapting and enhancing the solution iteratively according to user’s feedback, even if it means moving away from the existing solution.

The other important learning from the project was understanding the ways of keeping the final solution simple (e.g applying heuristics), removing the extra weight and iteratively simplifying the solution keeping it as minimal and focussed as possible.

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” — Steve Jobs.

Recognitions

Was awarded the ‘Gandhian Young technological Innovator Award- Design Category’, by the Hon’ble President of India Shri. Ram Nath Kovind, for the C-Vein project in 2018.