iPod for Diabetics: Charmr
Amy Tenderich wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs, asking to use Appleâs design expertise to invent a device which helps diabetics to have a better life. Diabetics canât leave their home without an insulin pump and/or blood glucose monitor wired to their body. Even though they have portable devices but those are far short of our expectation in terms of design and usability. Itâs annoying sometimes and clunky.
We are, of course, deeply grateful to the medical device industry for keeping us alive.But while theyâre still struggling with shrinking complex technologies down to a scale where we can attach them, hard-wired, to our bodies, design kinda becomes an afterthought.
She also said:
In short, medical device manufacturers are stuck in a bygone era; they continue to design these products in an engineering-driven, physician-centered bubble. They have not yet grasped the concept that medical devices are also life devices, and therefore need to feel good and look good for the patients using them 24/7, in addition to keeping us alive.
And not long after her blog, surprisingly Adaptive Path, a company with usability expertise responded to her call and designed an excellent conceptual product. You can find the story about it on their blog. This is a video overview:
I felt a headache whenever I was told that I should take a look into bio & nano technologies and the next revolution would happen where those technology meet IT technology. Logically I couldnât agree more with the idea but I was baffled because I don’t have any background in those fields and didnât know where to start. But when I saw the Charmr video, I felt like seeing a ray of light in the dark cave. This might be a sign of ‘Singularity’ as Dr. Raymond Kurzweil is telling us in his recent book. You might think that we don’t even have wearable computers yet and that kind of thing wouldn’t come into our lives in the near future. But think again, iPod is a wearable computer and Charmr is one, too. We *are* already in that stage.
If you wanna dive into the world of these new technologies, you will find this interview interesting: Guy’s interview with Moira Gun, the author of Welcome to Biotech Nation“.
Tags: adaptive, bio, charmr, design, diabetic, Innovation, ipod, path, portable, technology, user