Competitive products

Our concept focuses on solving problems in two areas: authentication and ergonomy.

For authentication there are multiple solutions, and for that reason alone, our design would not bring much new. But as a combination with other features, it seems to be unique.
We could think authentication as an easy-to-implement solution, assuming all other parts of the system are available.

For correcting ergonomy, there are different product available. One of the closest to our design would be TruPosture-smart shirt, which monitors posture and gives notifications and feedback on correcting the posture. (www.truposture.com) Considering posture, what it does is pretty much the same than in ours, but the differences are in the feedback system. In addition to vibration and audio-visual feedback via external device, our design uses the haptic feedback done by the self-hardening materials, that actually guide towards correct posture.

There are also “not-smart”, mechanical solutions available for posture correcting. Different vests limit movement in a way that, when properly adjusted, bad posture feels uncomfortable when correct posture feels more comfortable. As a downside, these need to be worn quite tight, so it is possible that they feel always a bit uncomfortable. Another thing is that they do not track posture. Then again, they are more affordable. When looking for the most affordable solution for preventing the posture too much forward, a good-old life-hack tape on the spine, will do the trick.

One big distinguishing factor in our design is the connectivity and automatisation. Our system uses user recognition to recognize the user, but by that the devices in the smart office can also recognize user, which makes automatisation of different personally adjustable variables feasible. Systems that recognizes user position and does the ergonomic office furniture adjustments automatically, seems to be not available. Added to this the authentication features and all the other possibilities it gives, our system has many distinguishing factors compared to competitors.

Kommentit

Lähetä kommentti

Tämän blogin suosituimmat tekstit

Measuring abstract UX-goals for not yet implementable futuristic designs

How to measure abstract UX-goals for not yet implementable futuristic designs? In this course we make designs for future. We “aim for a product with a future view – aim is for a product to be introduced or on the market around year 2025-2030”. Therefore everything cannot be implemented nor even prototyped very easily. If the the features of the design is not ready to be implemented, there are still ways to get user feedback on them. In so called Wizard of Oz method there is a hidden tester controlling the system, but the participant thinks the machine is doing the things. Using this method the test team can test features that are for example either impossible or too difficult, time demanding or too expensive to implement. The product can be also demonstrated by different forms of descriptions, scenarios or story telling. Some parts can be prototyped, some drawn, some textually explained. In our case user testing was done by a combination of a light version of Wizard of Oz, in whi...
Lue lisää

Ideation process

Kuva
While we had a workshop ideation session we managed to get about 20 features and ideas in total. We got best results while thinking about the ideas alone without any self censorship. Then we put the ideas on a big paper and sorted them. Hardest part of the ideation process was defining the problem and idea selection (See picture of double-diamond process). Ideation session canvas Current minimum features are user recognition, posture recognition, workstation adaptability to user settings and identification to restricted areas. There are also other ideas and features and we are planning to have a questionnaire about the most desirable features and then iterate those further. We plan to implement these features with a smart clothing (t-shirt, hoodie, etc) and a link device (wristband, smartwatch, smart ring). Ideation affected positively to our product development. We now almost have a “complete” product concept idea on our hands. Before it we didn’t really have anything co...
Lue lisää

Trend map about intelligent clothing and biometric information

Kuva
Smart wearables that are available to be used in this day and age mostly consist of wearables for hand such as rings, watches and wristbands. There are also some smart t-shirts and jackets, but most of the time they need to be connected to a phone so the smart features can be used. Analysts of Gartner predicts high growth in wearable technology sales and shipments from 2019 to 2022. Specially smart watches, head mounted displays and earworn smart wearables are going to gain great popularity according to Gartner’s analysis. The expected growth of smart clothing is more calm, but by 2022 Gartner predicts the amount of shipped units to be 19.91 million units, as it is currently 5.65 million units. There is a link further down the text for this analysis. Our trend map consist of current smart clothes and wearables, different measured metrics and what future technologies can make possible regarding to measured metrics and features for smart wearables. They relate to our topic...
Lue lisää