KRIASH is a medical startup founded by Dr. Neetika Ashwani. It aims to support the bond between parents and their infants through skin to skin care (SSC), the simple act of an adult holding an infant to their chest and maintaining skin contact. To this end they have developed the MamaCuddles band and patch devices.
In just three weeks we delivered a comprehensive, testable prototype for the MamaCuddles device, including:
▸ UX Research and Product Design
concepting features,
user interviews, competitive analysis, usability testing, journey mapping, user flows
▸ Visual Design and Branding
color, typography, imagery,
tone
MamaCuddles is a non invasive, wireless sensor bracelet and patch set that offer continuous monitoring of infant vitals while tracking Skin to Skin Care (SSC). KRIASH prioritizes SSC because of evidence that shows that SSC provides a number of benefits to infants: the bolstering of growth and brain development, improved quality of life and reduced disease burden. It’s more commonly understood that SSC is important for babies born prematurely, but those health benefits largely extend to full term babies as well–and some even to adults (e.g. release of oxytocin, feeling of bonding, etc.)
Our core deliverable was a design for a parent-facing mobile app that interfaces with the MamaCuddles device to provide real time feedback on the health and wellness of both parent and child.
To start, our team needed to get a better understanding of the infant-monitoring-device market (which sounds more niche than it is). By conducting a feature inventory, we learned that while other monitoring apps tracked vitals like heartrate or blood oxygen, none tracked SSC hours. We took some lessons from existing baby monitoring products like Neebo, Owlet, and Ovia–as well as from comparators like period tracking and glucose monitoring apps.
We interviewed 12 parents, most of whom have had children within the past 10 years. Through this practice we wanted to find out more about our users and better understand:
This is what folks were saying:
After synthesizing those interviews we arrived at some findings:
This prospective flow illustrates the fear, confusion, and anxiety that parents feel during the birthing and childcare experience.
We then built some personas that speak to this unique experience.
Our problem statement centers around Fiona the full-term mother, who also happens to be our primary persona. This is because MamaCuddles is a direct-to-consumer product with an at-home use case and parents with full-term babies would represent a majority of the user base. Premie parents are already well-aware of the benefits of SSC–but among fullterm parents that knowledge is less common, and actually tracking SSC is even less so. We landed on this problem statement that would guide our design ideation:
Finally, in order to ensure we’re keeping our problem in mind as well ideate substantive solutions, the team generated How-Might-We statements that explore potential solution paths. These 4 HMWs ended up as the genesis of the main features and functionality of the app.
Now that we’ve landed on some cool functionality, we need to style it to look good and flow well. We worked with the client to develop some general design guidelines:
Using the research we conducted, we developed these features for the app. Here we’ll explore how those features solve for our problem statement and address user needs.
SSC Ring and Alerts Timeline
Understand how close you are to your goals at a glance, and get reminders what the
vitals that matter the most to you.
Biometric Details
Understand the history and context of your baby’s biometrics.
Note Feature
Compose notes, mark them up, and share with physicians or loved ones.
Onboarding Flow
Gets user oriented to the app, and outlines main functions of both it and the device.
Designed and built by Anthony Sudol © 2024
