Inspirational First Family Visit
About a year ago, I met Colleen, the proud mother of her two sons, Finn and Ronan. I remember meeting with Colleen at Timeless Coffee Roasters on Piedmont Ave in Oakland, and listening to her concerns in managing both of her sons’ health. Her youngest son, Finn, has a mild to moderate case of asthma coupled with allergies. In quest for having control over her Finn’s health, she volunteered to help KNOX build out our product. Our device was being already being tested with several kids at UCSF, but we wanted to take our product outside of the hospital and into the homes of families.
In July 2015, Huyson and I stepped into Colleen’s house and met 7 year old Finn for the first time. We showed Colleen and Finn how to use our clunky device with our app, and left instructions just in case. As we were ready to leave, Colleen noticed me staring at our device and reassured me “I know this is your baby. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it and if anything goes wrong, I’ll be sure to let you know.” With that, I felt at ease and left her house.
I returned every couple of weekends. On the second visit, I upgraded her device with a rechargeable one. I learned that she had forgotten her password on several occasions and couldn’t reset it through our app. Huyson quickly fixed the issue and allowed for a password reset by the following week. However, that didn’t solve the issue since she had over 30 other passwords to remember, and forgot the one for our app. She hadn’t been conducting spirometry on a daily basis, since if it’s not something she could test in less than 10 minutes, she ran out of time in the mornings. As a result, Huyson built out the app with a TouchID login. It took us 2 in-person visits to arrive at this solution. Over the next couple of weeks, we continued to keep in touch, and about a month after the first visit, we collected our product for some major revamping.
We learned numerous things about Colleen’s family: the busiest time of day were the mornings, and although she had originally planned to conduct the test during this time, she quickly learned that night time is much slower, and Finn tends to only have breathing issues before bed time. Therefore, she switched to monitoring his health at night, when she had a bit more free time.
I had made several false assumptions when working with Colleen. I assumed that since she’s an extremely busy mom, she wouldn’t want to be contacted frequently. I had learned that she wanted to be reached out to more often, so she knew that I cared about her.
I also learned that in order to build a product for kids, we need to ask and learn what kids enjoy doing. At the end of our first home trial, I asked Finn to draw me what he’d like to have, and so he did. He also requested that it be orange, his favorite color.
This is the approach KNOX has been taking in developing our product: closely listening to the families we’re working with, building out potential solutions, presenting it back to them, and repeating the process until we all have something we love. Especially when it comes to working towards children’s health, we want to create a product that they truly enjoy using, and is not just something they’re forced to use. In doing so, we’re blurring the lines between consumer and medical products. We’re building things that real people will actually use.
If you’re a parent of an asthmatic, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Email me at charvi@knox.co.
