Small yet smart
Sparrow was designed from the bottom up to track individual pill dispensing in a monthly, easy to carry, package. The top part (the puck) is kept month over month and contains all of the sensors required to run the device. The monthly refill contains the pills, the memory, and a small battery that lasts for 30+ days. When snapped together Sparrow lights up when it's time to take your day's pill and after sliding it open it confirms and records that a pill was removed.
Hardware as a service
One of the most important features of Sparrow is how it is seamlessly integrated with your pharmacy. The pill detection and tracking not only allows for your to remember and record when you took your pill but it also enables smart refills from your pharmacy of choice.
The packaging and software are designed to integrate with partner pharmacies like ScriptDash who will ship out your next monthly refill cartridge as soon as your need it. This means no more last-minute runs to the pharmacy on a Sunday night (a common point of adherence drop-off for people).
Several user interviews with key takeaways from their interviews.
User Research
The first several months of developing Sparrow focused entirely on interviewing patients, doctors, pharmacists and medical executives to better understand how the problem could be addressed. Many of the key feature that went into Sparrow came from the dozens of interviews I conducted with users to better understand needs, wants, and latent issues they couldn't directly name.
This research also included visits to users homes to see their daily regimen in person. These visits, as should be expected, yielded some of the most salient insights into how to improve adherence.
Product Development
Since it was important that all parts of the product functioned as one system, all development of Sparrow was done in-house. This included the initial user research, synthesis, design prototyping, and hardware / software development.
LED Design
One key feature that was prototyped multiple times with several PCB revisions in-between was the interaction of the user with Sparrow's multiple LEDS. I spent an enormous amount of time building quick prototypes on breadboards to test concepts while eventually moving out to full PCB fabrications once we had selected specific LEDs, layout and interactions.
