Hydroband
HydroBand is an IoT water bottle with a wearable wrist bracelet that can proactively notify the wearer if they are becoming dehydrated.
Role
Researcher, UX designer
Team
Group Work(Course Project-WTW)
Project Overview
The course of wearable technology for wellness (WTW) focuses on universal design (UD) for wearables which is the design of everyday products and spaces to be usable by all people to the greatest extent possible without the need for adaptation or specialized design. During the 3 months course, we designed a wearable wrist bracelet that can proactively notify the wearer if they are becoming dehydrated guided by the principle of universal design.
What I did
1. Conducted user research
2. Leaded the UX design
3. Conducted user test collaborating with team members
Solution Highlights
Solution -
The product consists of three parts: a mobile App, a water bottle, and a wristband.
Water Bottle -
The water bottle has a built-in weight meter that monitors how much water is left in the bottle.
App -
The moble App works to link wristbands and bottles together, and also users can look up historical data.
Wristband-
The wristband can notify users by buzzing to drink at a regular time to make sure they take enough water every day. The lights also display the progress of intake.
Research
Background-
The number of water people need to drink to stay hydrated fluctuates each day. However, the average American is often consistently underhydrated, which can lead to fatigue, unclear thinking, and kidney stones.
How can we help students maintain a healthy level of hydration every day, while conforming to their lifestyle?
Focal Points
To guide our design process, we created the following focal points around which we centered our research:
1️⃣ Do students believe that they are consistently adequately hydrated?
2️⃣ How do students determine whether they are adequately hydrated?
3️⃣ What strategies do students currently employ to keep themselves hydrated?
4️⃣ What other liquids might students be supplementing their total water intake with?
Unstructured Observations
Description-
The goal of the observation is to see people's drinking behavior in different environments.
⚫️ University library
⚫️ Public, common space on campus
⚫️ Sit-down restaurant near campus.
30 minutes each
Key Findings
1. Reusable drinking vessels varied in material, ranging from reused single-use plastics such as milk jugs to dedicated plastic or metal water bottles.
2. The actual act of drinking water does not seem to be a primary, conscious task, unless the vessel is in view.
3. Students’ employment of purchasing a drink to remove themselves from a heated debate within a group conversation, allowing the group to decompress during their absence, and letting productive conversation resume upon their return.
Description-
Based on our observations, we constructed a questionnaire to further understand our target audience’s drinking behavior.
1️⃣what kinds of fluids the respondent consumes
2️⃣what vessel do they choose to consume water out of
3️⃣when they consume water
4️⃣what methods are employed to maintain a healthy level of hydration.
Key Findings
Keeping vessels nearby as a hydration method
They keep the bottles nearby to maintain a healthy level of hydration. A wearable intervention could potentially incorporate a measurement of water intake by monitoring these reusable vessels.
Hydration as an ad hoc process, informed by signals
From our research, hydration is a process that does not occur on a scheduled or rhythmic basis for students. Instead, students rely on their memory or biological signals like thirst or urine color to remind them to hydrate.
Lack of confidence in current and adequate hydration levels
Students are not confident that they maintain an adequate daily level of hydration. Only 20% of respondents to our questionnaire strongly agreed with the statement that they drank enough water on a daily basis, while most respondents only somewhat agreed with it.
-Semi-Structured Interviews
Description-
To supplement the quantitative results we got from the questionnaire, we conducted 5 semi-structured interviews, each of which were recorded.
Key Findings
After all of the semi-structured interviews had been conducted, researcher notes from each interview were transcribed into digital “sticky notes” on The notes were then organized into themes using affinity mapping, and those themes were grouped together into high-level findings.
1. People are aware they don't drink enough water but they feel hard to change.
2. The amount of water they drink highly depends on the demands of the day.
3. People have vague clue of how much water they should drink per day.
4.People rely on signals to tell them if they had enough water.
Define
Persona-
We made 1 main persona and 2 secondary to specify our target users. Each of them has a different level of dehydrated problems.
Task Descriptions-
Based on the user research, we identified 3 main tasks of our product, which are remembering to drink water throughout the day, adjusting water goals for the day, and reviewing progress towards goal water intake. The table is a different levels of functions.
Design concept
Description-
In the brainstrom phase, we came up with 3 possible solutions.
Storyboard-
We decided to work on the wristband one in the end.
Prototype
Description-
We firstly make a plan for this prototype. It must show how much water the user has consumed via lights It must be able to vibrate to remind the user to drink water. Because our microcontroller must be connected to a computer to run, we will input commands via the serial monitor of the Arduino, which will control the behavior of the lights and vibrations. While ideally, we would be able to perform this behavior wirelessly, the amount of time between the prototype implementation and the user evaluations makes it challenging to implement a fully wireless system.
User Test
Description-
We recruited three Georgia Tech graduate students who either owned or had interacted with smartphones and smartwatches. Two of the participants were female, and one participant was male. All three participants were recruited via department-wide Slack channels. We found a time that worked for all three participants and set aside a 2-hour block to evaluate our prototype with each participant consecutively.
Our user evaluations had two primary goals: evaluating how appropriate the modalities of notification that we had selected were, and whether our users’ mental model of the application matched that of our own.
System is Effective
When exposed to the wristband notifications, participants, unprompted, asked if the vibrations and lights were intended to indicate that they should drink more water. Our questionnaire results reinforce the notion that the notification method is intuitive: two of our three participants indicated that they found the solution easy to understand, and the third participant was neutral.
Tactile Over Visual Feedback
All three participants expressed reservations that the lights used on the medium-fidelity prototype were too bright. While support for using tactile and visual feedback was strong in our participatory design, the prominence of the lights could be reduced through a properly-fitted enclosure, and the brightness of the lights can be easily decreased using resistors.
Muting is Mandatory
Two of the three participants indicated a desire to be able to “mute” the device from providing notifications temporarily (suggested times were 15-30 minutes). This echoes a sentiment gathered from our co-design session: there are times when repeated notifications are inconvenient, even within the contexts deemed appropriate. While unimplemented for our medium-fidelity prototype, our final design will include affordances for temporarily silencing notifications from the device.
Rationality of The Interface
Participant 1 has some problems with finding weekly records, and she indicated that the icons in the interface are confused. She cannot match the icon with the function. Participant 2 said that we should make clear menu bars in the app. She mentioned that she cannot follow the rationale of the app.
Final Design
