Approved Insulin storage survey

I am a product design student from Loughborough university and have chosen to design a storage device for temperature sensitive medicine (basically redesign a cool bag) for my final year project. I have created this survey to help me do user research for the project and would be very grateful if you could take a minute to fill it out (if you feel like leaving the two written answers blank because you don't know what to put that is fine!).

https://goo.gl/forms/jU4HzVB4TN1KlMg83

Thanks,
Tom

Engineer88 said:

Are you benchmarking against the Frio bag? @Design_Tom_

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Thanks for all the support guys!

Yeah I am aware of the Frio products and I think they are probably market leader in the category in most respects. From what I can tell their main disadvantages are that they get damp and are only usable in a ventilated environment (i.e not inside a bag). Their biggest advantages are short recharge time and really simplistic design and relatively long period of use (Website says 45 Hours but reviews say longer than that).

For cool bags in general I would say their biggest problems are having to freeze the cooling elements (so long recharge time) and lack of insulation means they don't have a long period of use (probably about 12 hours). Also the freezing elements take up a lot of space making the bags potentially quite bulky - especially once you factor in the padding to stop the ice packs coming into direct contact with the insulin and freezing it. By far their biggest advantage is their low price point and they can be stored in luggage. Also people seem to like that some of them come with straps to help secure insulin in place.

Overall I think there is room for improvement in producing an insulin storage product that can be kept anywhere (problem with Frio) and last for up to 3-4 days before requiring 'recharging' (problem with cool bags). Also I think more consideration could be put into combining storage of pens/insulin vials and other insulin related equipment; although 50% of people answered: "I like to separate my insulin and equipment".

From the replies I've got so far other features I could consider implementing are internal temperature monitor (seems very useful), alarm if temp gets too high and "Time lapse since insulin was last taken" (this could be possible).

I am just about to start concept development for this project so will try to keep you up to date and hopefully get some useful feedback on the product direction. If you have any opinions on my analysis of current products please let me know!

Thanks,
Tom

Hi,

The result to the question: How do you store your insulin and equipment? intrigues me. 60% of people answer: "I like to separate my insulin and equipment".

Is this because you separate your insulin and equipment in different pockets/compartments of the same product or you have them in separate products? If so, why do you keep them in separate products? (I feel like I may have overlooked something obvious).

Thanks for help so far, I've got 27 responses!

Engineer88 said:

Its not really feasible to keep an insulin pump with blood monitoring equipment - a pump is on your person the tester is in a bag. I have no need or intention to keep it all together. Are you diabetic Tom?

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No I am not diabetic, thanks for the response! Definitely put things into perspective.

So I was hoping to be able to present you with some early concepts about now but I'm not quite ready yet - maybe this Friday or latest next week Monday. However, I have made another really short survey to get some responses to see what features are most important to you for temperature controlled insulin storage: https://goo.gl/forms/JdzFBtVJOHlUHQds2.

I have split the survey into insulin pumps and insulin pens as I think the size requirements for the two are different - based on both how they are carried around and what is being stored in them (Insulin pens are bigger than I thought!).

Thanks for helping out again and I hope to present you some ideas soon!

@azure is it okay if I make this new survey into another thread? (Don't want to be spamming but think its got a bit lost in this comment section)