The objective of this project was to create a diabetes management kit that aids patients recently diagnosed with diabetes with managing their diagnosis.
The DIY-DM kits are part of an NIH-sponsored project with collaborators from Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the Segal Design Institute. My main role in this project was to design and develop design solutions to improve the user experience of the DIY-DM kits based on different user group feedback over the summer. Once the major design problems were solved, my role transitioned from designing to overseeing and documenting the manufacturing process of 120 of these DIY diabetic management (DM) kits for NIH-sponsored clinical trials set to begin in the fall.
Type: Human-Centered Design, Manufacturing, Product Design
Client: Feinberg School of Medicine
Duration: June 2021 - June 2022
Role: Engineering Design Intern
Deliverables: Documentation, Physical Prototype
The DIY-DM kits were created to help people recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes manage their condition and learn to take care of themselves, as this diagnosis brings on a series of lifestyle changes for the user, which include things such as learning to take their own glucose levels or injecting themselves with insulin when needed.
To help these patients quickly grasp the necessary treatment steps they need to integrate into their lifestyle once they leave the hospital, the DIY-DM kits provide patients with the basic tools they will need to use to conduct their treatments in a simple and accessible format, accompanied with both physical and digital copies of their treatment plan to walk them through the process.
One of the major pain points identified through user testing was that older patients had difficulty identifying how components of the kit fit into the plastic inserts within each box.
To solve that issue, I suggested creating a numerical labeling system that mapped each section of the plastic inserts to the stickers found on the inner side of the lids.
The process of creating the numerical labeling system for the vacuum-formed inserts were as follows:
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Once I had determined that embossing the numerical labeling system worked best from both a user and manufacturing perspective, the other interns implemented these changes into all future inserts created for the clinical trials and the impact these changes had to the DIY-DM kits can be summarized as follows:
Another important component of the DIY-DM kits was the skin molds, which were included in the kit to provide users with a fake skin sample on which to practice injecting insulin. There were a number of questions associated to the design of these molds, as listed below:
To solve the questions above, I generated a testing protocol to answer each one of the questions listed out in the following way:
As we began mass production in preparation for the fall clinical trials, some of the bottlenecks that I was tasked with resolving included the following:
