Designing a Wearable Mental Health Tracker: A Seven-Week Collaboration with a Health-Tech Startup

Abstract

The potential of digital technologies enables us to shape and develop new approaches to healthcare practices. This paper illustrates the outcomes of a seven-week product design project carried out with senior year students in collaboration with a health tech start-up firm, UMAXLIFE. The company has developed a wearable device that tracks patients’ physiological data to create evidence for psychotherapy sessions, which is helpful for both adopting an evidence-based approach to patient monitoring and creating an objective documentation of patient records. The studio project aimed to develop the next generation of the physical wearable device and to redesign the software component of the system. The objective of the project was to explore how industrial design approaches can transform a technologically driven prototype into a clinically appropriate and user-centered design concepts suitable for needs of therapeutic processes.The seven-week project started with desk research, including a literature review with benchmarking of existing wearable health technologies. The research stage is followed by concept generation based on identified user needs, technical requirements, and workflows. The concepts are refined through design iterations and low-fidelity prototypes during the design detailing phase of the project, following the concept selection stage. In the final stage, project teams developed detailed product designs, including ergonomic considerations, technological capabilities, and product software user interface for tracking and documentation. This paper documents the studio process and discusses the resulting design outcomes in terms of ideation themes, design qualities, challenges, and the integration of technological and human-centered considerations. The project shows how collaborations with health technology companies can generate innovative product concepts while providing the learning outcomes for design students. It also highlights the contribution of industrial design approaches in development of emerging health technologies toward usable, acceptable, and meaningful tools.

Keywords: Wearable health technologies, medical product design, university-start-up collaboration

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007259