What if…Artificial Intelligence powered health monitoring apps are used to determine health insurance premiums.

Interactive product display at the Rhode Island School of Design graduate show 2024. Display was designed as a product demo like ones you would find in BestBuy.

QuickCare was developed as a product from a potential speculative future with the goal to show the importance of data privacy in the current landscape of AI powered products.

Speculative Future is a design practice exploring the consequences of a scenario set in the future with the goal to spark conversation about whether the future shown is desirable or not.

Project Details

Capstone project

Individual

3 months (March 2024 - May 2024)

My Role

Branding

Physical Product design

Arduino Coding

Product Website UI design

Tools

Figma

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Premiere Pro

Fusion 360

Autodesk Maya

Substance Painter

Arduino Uno

Choosing a medium for my message: Health monitoring apps and devices are prevalent, inconspicuous and brimming with unexplored potential consequences.

It was important to choose a medium that people related to. I chose health monitoring and AI recommendations because smartwatches are common and people are used to health notifications.

So QuickCare began by taking a deeper look into the following:

  • AI recommendation systems like Spotify, Instagram, Grammarly

  • Health and fitness monitoring applications

  • Amazon and OneMedical merger in 2023

I started sketching out products from this proposed future. Leaning into the futuristic theme I explored cyberpunk inspired imagery in terms of an aesthetic for these products and moved on to exploring what forms could look like in 3D space by modeling shapes using foamcore.

Initial concept exploration for products

I wanted people to come away with a belief that the product QuickCare is not too good to be true, but so real that it could be.

Crafting the illusion: Establishing credibility for the project came from grounding it in reality

I started looking at consumer electronic designs and identified common trends and aesthetic choices the designers were making.

Preserving the human element in the dystopic message

I wanted to experience to feel both human and slightly doomsday-esque. This informed the decision to move away from the cyberpunk inspired sketches and to go with a silhouette that looked like a finger pad.

The product itself had to look like it was mass-produced and something that could be found in a big box store like BestBuy or Target. This gave direction to the look and feel of the final product. The size of the products was also based off the idea that it could be placed on a table.

Designing the system that doesn’t exist: Coding the product interaction

I wanted people to expereince the product as it would be in the proposed future and so designed a prototype that would deliver the experience of scanning your biometric information and give a recommendation on your insurance premium rates.

Electronic components used to simulate the experience

Arduino Uno Rev 3

Adafruit TFT 2.8” LCD

PulseSensor (Heart Rate Sensor)

Momentary Push LED Button

The heart rate sensor takes the beats per minute reading when you place your finger on it and calculates the median value from 1o readings. Depending on the threshold within which the median value falls a message is displayed on the screen which is the AI recommendation along with the beats per minute rate. These messages were carefully worded in order to get people to think about what a future like would feel like.

Final code with mounted electronics. Photo taken at Rhode Island School of Design Graduate Show 2024

Creating a brand that for a product that doesn’t exist: How QuickCare came to be

Designing the product as if it was mass-produced would only do so much without a brand and logo. I came up with QuickCare by riffing off current insurance and medical service names. The colour blue was also chosen to mimic the blue typically used as a brand colour by these services.

Initial sketch exploration of logos and lock-ups. I moved forward with a stylised fingerprint design to call upon the finger heart rate sensor.

Adding in elements to start the conversation: How I used advertisements, a webpage and product reviews to talk about data privacy.

The experience relied on being plausible and what’s more realistic than being given perosanlised ads while a device is scraping your personal data on a daily basis. I designed the UI to mimic the aesthetic of fitness apps like Apple Fitness, Google Health and Samsung Fitness and came up with ads screens that would be displayed while the sensor and code was running in the background.

Personalised ad #1

Personalised ad #2

Personalised ad #3

If you make a project about a speculative futures and no one believes it, was it effective?

For the 2024 Grad Show at the Rhode Island School of Design, I created a mobile product page accessible via QR code. This page featured tongue-in-cheek comments about data scraping and enticing features encouraging users to trade personal data for monetary benefits. Clicking "learn more" or "buy" led to a page revealing the project as a speculative future scenario and asked visitors to share their thoughts on its potential reality. This also served as a metric to test the believability of the concept, gauging interest through QR scans.

Still screen grabs of the webpage

Out of the classroom and into the world: Presenting QuickCare to an audience

The project was exhibited at the 2024 Rhode Island School of Design graduate show as well as a capstone project in the ENGN 2172 Integrate and Implement course. The gallery exhibit was designed to look similar to product displays in electronic stores with a representative (me) guiding you through the product experience. During the class presentation, QuickCare was presented by me as a product CEO pitching the idea to potential investors.

Class presentation of QuickCare as a CEO pitching to potential investors

52 visits to the mobile product page.

2 minutes and 30 seconds was the average time spent on product page.

The statistics are reported from Squarespace’s analytics tabs which logs webpage visits and time spent on a page from the day of opening night for the 2024 RISD Grad Show.