Week 3: Complications in our Design
This week, we continued to improve our device’s features and compatibility with the setting we were working with. Midway through the week, we realized that our perspective on the users and region of the device was extremely broad, so we further narrowed down different aspects of the product, which will be discussed further.
Meeting with Rhonda, Part 2
Our second meeting with Rhonda on Tuesday was just as insightful as our first, if not more. We learned about different types of customers who we might want to appeal to and how, using techniques such as market dynamics, testing the value propositions, and understanding who can access the product. After her presentation, we gave our product presentation along with Team Blue and the CancerMune group and planned to implement what we learned from Rhonda and our interviews in our device.
Our Interviews for this Week
This week was filled with interviews from the start. On Monday, we met with Karthik Prasad, a medical school student at UCI School of Medicine and one of the members of the Capstone project. He was very excited to hear about our iterations of the device his team worked on, and he provided us with great feedback on improvements. The main takeaway from his points was that we need to be more direct and certain about what our goals are with our project. We were analyzing about tackling our projects with a perspective of living in a developed country, which prevented us from understanding certain aspects of life in a developing country. For instance, we perceived the majority of Africa to have similar hospital settings and issues within those settings. However, the case was completely different, as we learned from interviewing Aran Bahl and Sara Sampson, two other members of the Capstone project. They informed us that even the hospitals in a particular city vary in many different aspects, whether it be power, WiFi connectivity, or something else.
We interviewed another customer, Dr. Teresa Kortz, who implied the same things — we needed to be more precise in where we desire to implement our product. So as a result, we decided to narrow down our customer segments even further. First, we made sure to emphasize that Uganda was the region of Africa we were targeting. Next, instead of stating that secondary and tertiary hospitals would station our device, we specified four hospitals in Uganda — Mulago Hospital, St. Mary’s Hospital Lacor, China-Uganda Friendship Hospital Naguru, and Kiruddu General Referral Hospital. After that, we understood that an age range must be specified as well since our first device would not have the specifications for all ages. To resolve this issue, we decided to focus on adults who may be at risk for unstable vitals due to trauma, a previous condition, etc. We also made it a point to specify the characteristics of our device — it would have a light grey plastic coating due to plastic’s insulating capabilities, and would be water-resistant to account for sweat and humidity. We will be working on optimizing our product further in the coming weeks, as well as gaining new insights from customers who have experience in the engineering field to help aid us in our design.
