1. Summarize the problem you set out to solve. What was the challenge posed to you? Did it get you excited and why?

There is a significant conversation around health, wellness and our healthcare experiences, along with healthcare reform and the opportunity for innovation in healthcare. We believe the responsibility for health and wellness should not be delegated and that the consumer him or herself ultimately has the highest impact on their health - by living a healthy lifestyle and taking more responsibility themselves. Therefore we saw an opportunity for a personal health system and identified the following challenges:

1. How can we motivate people to live a healthier lifestyle?
2. How can we engage people more in preventative care, and how can we increase their health awareness?
3. How can we teach people how to stay healthy?
4. How can we make health data more accessible?
5. How can a personal health product adjust to the needs of different people? There are many systems which track a single set of data very well, but nothing that adapts to the personal needs of people and tracks multiple data combinations.

2. What point of view did you bring to the challenge? Was there anything additional that you wanted to achieve with this project or bring to this project that was not part of the original brief?

With Modwells we were looking to apply some of the principles that constitute a new approach to design, which we’re calling “21st Century Design”. One of the core principles is autonomy or human liberty, which is the belief that every individual should be able to make their own choices about their own life free from overbearing religious and political authority—we need to aim for a self-aware form of autonomy, informed by a deeper appreciation of the foundations, possibilities and frailties of human nature. 21st Century Design recognizes that changing a person’s context is a much more powerful and effective way of shaping behavior than attempting to change one’s mind.

3. When designing this project, whose interests did you consider? (Discuss various stakeholders, audiences, retailing, manufacturing, assembly, distribution, etc., for example.)

The system acknowledges that every person has unique personal needs for health and wellbeing and it accommodates those needs through a customizable solution that blurs the line between “medical” and “personal lifestyle”.

4. Describe the rigor that informed your design. (Research, ethnography, subject matter experts, materials exploration, technology, iteration, testing, etc., as applicable.) If this was a strictly research or strategy project, please provide more detail here.

Rather than trying to take the healthcare space in all at once, we began dissecting it into bite-sized chunks to understand the current state and identify opportunities through secondary research and interviews. This helped us identify both user and industry needs, pain points and insights that led to the solution.

5. What is the social value of your design? (Gladdening, educational, economic, paradigm-shifting, sustainable, labor-mindful, environmental, cultural, etc.) How does it earn its keep in the world?

Ultimately Modwells is about empowering the individual to lead a better life, it utilizes sensor-technology to construct a healthcare experience that leverages inherent motivational patterns and seamlessly integrates the power of health data into our daily-lives when specific choices are made.
• Augmented natural body awareness. By bringing biometrics into our everyday lives we create a set of tools that build awareness of our bodies, and give insight into how our habits and behaviors promote or detract from wellbeing.
• Contextual health choices. Mods provide alerts and feedback in context to help make good decisions. The application provides in-depth information about your data, related health information and suggestions on how to improve.
• Customizable. Sensors can be combined in various looks at biometric data in order to suit the individual’s specific situation and needs.
• Health more social and fun. The Modwells system involves our social network from products such as Facebook and Twitter in our health experience to motivate, help and support.
• Accessible and easy to understand Health data. The collected data is always stored in the cloud and can be accessed through the trestle or more in depth with a mobile/web application.
• Instant historical data. Because Modwells are “always on”, both user and medical practitioner have access to rich biometric data “over a period of time” rather than “at a point in time.”

6. If you could have done one thing differently with the project, what would you have changed?

For this project, it’s less about doing a phase differently and more about continuing the design process. A good next step would be to test a working prototype with users to see what’s working, what needs improvement and refine the design. In addition, it would be ideal to develop additional scenarios to showcase the extended capabilities of this platform. Currently, we are illustrating just one scenario.