3..2..1.. Go !

By Antoine Albertelli December 7, 2016 Edition CHIC 2016-2017Discover Ilanga project

Hi everyone, Team Wellness reporting in! What a crazy time for all of us: everyone has a ton to do for class and CHIC doesn’t help. Anyway, maybe we should start by introducing ourselves, shall we? On the engineering side, we have Adrien (mechanical engineering) and myself (microengineering). They will have to think hard to implement solutions to all the technical challenges the team will face. Our two designers, Thomas (media interaction design) and Dimitri (industrial design) will also have a lot to do in order to make sure our product is not only functional, but also attractive! Finally, Loïc (HEC) will make sure everyone stays on track: we need to be sure that we are building the right product, for the right users, at the right price!
Two weeks ago, we delivered our first presentation as a team: we showed our initial concepts in front of a panel coming from EPFL, ECAL & HEC. We explained that we wanted to focus on sleep quality, a major issue in the 21st century. We had two potential target customer segments in mind: the first was the young, active professionals and the second was the opposite: elderly people living in retirement homes. We were especially interested in the latter as there is not a lot of technical products targeting them.
However, after taking into account the feedback from our presentation, we decided that we needed to pivot for two reasons: The first one was that old people are a customer segment that we might not be able to completely understand, which would lead to a useless product. The second reason, which also prevented research in the young professional market was that measuring sleep quality and quantity can be tricky from a technical point of view. Since a complex and expensive system is out of the scope of CHIC we had to find something else. We were back to square one. but with less time to find a solution!
After a lot of brainstorming sessions, where a lot of ideas were born and killed, we arrived at our current idea: we want to make a device to measure exposure to UV rays during outdoor activities. This information would then be processed to warn our users when they need to go rest in the shade and/or put on some sun lotion. We think this idea has a lot of potential: sunburns are a pain that everyone experienced and skin cancer is definitely something to be worried about. We are also very confident in our ability to complete this project.
Let’s do it!