What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process that teams use to understand users, challenge

assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. Involving

five phases—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test—it is most useful to tackle problems

that are ill-defined or unknown.

Why Is Design Thinking so Important?

In user experience (UX) design, it’s crucial to develop and refine skills to understand and address

rapid changes in users’ environments and behaviors. The world has become increasingly

interconnected and complex since cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon

first mentioned design thinking in his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, and then

contributed many ideas to its principles. Professionals from a variety of fields, including

architecture and engineering, subsequently advanced this highly creative process to address
human needs in the modern age. Twenty-first-century organizations from a wide range of

industries find design thinking a valuable means to problem-solve for the users of their products

and services. Design teams use design thinking to tackle ill-defined/unknown problems

(aka wicked problems) because they can reframe these in human-centric ways and focus on

what’s most important for users. Of all design processes, design thinking is almost certainly the

best for “thinking outside the box”. With it, teams can do better UX

research, prototyping and usability testing to uncover new ways to meet users’ needs.

Design thinking’s value as a world-improving, driving force in business (global heavyweights

such as Google, Apple and Airbnb have wielded it to notable effect) matches its status as a

popular subject at leading international universities. With design thinking, teams have the

freedom to generate ground-breaking solutions. Using it, your team can get behind hard-to-

access insights and apply a collection of hands-on methods to help find innovative answers.

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (aka the d.school) describes design thinking as

a five-stage process. Note: These stages are not always sequential, and teams often run them in

parallel, out of order and repeat them in an iterative fashion.

Stage 1: Empathize—Research Your Users' Needs

Here, you should gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve,

typically through user research. Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as

design thinking because it allows you to set aside your own assumptions about the world and

gain real insight into users and their needs.

Stage 2: Define—State Your Users' Needs and Problems

It’s time to accumulate the information gathered during the Empathize stage. You then analyze

your observations and synthesize them to define the core problems you and your team have

identified. These definitions are called problem statements. You can create personas to help keep

your efforts human-centered before proceeding to ideation.

Stage 3: Ideate—Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas

Now, you’re ready to generate ideas. The solid background of knowledge from the first two

phases means you can start to “think outside the box”, look for alternative ways to view the

problem and identify innovative solutions to the problem statement you’ve

created. Brainstorming is particularly useful here..

Stage 4: Prototype—Start to Create Solutions

This is an experimental phase. The aim is to identify the best possible solution for each problem

found. Your team should produce some inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product (or

specific features found within the product) to investigate the ideas you’ve generated. This could

involve simply paper prototyping.

Stage 5: Test—Try Your Solutions Out

Evaluators rigorously test the prototypes. Although this is the final phase, design thinking is

iterative: Teams often use the results to redefine one or more further problems. So, you can

return to previous stages to make further iterations, alterations and refinements – to find or rule

out alternative solutions.

Overall, you should understand that these stages are different modes which contribute to the

entire design project, rather than sequential steps. Your goal throughout is to gain the deepest

understanding of the users and what their ideal solution/product would be.
 NTRODUCTION

Smart bracelet is a kind of smart wearable gadget which is worn around the wrist to allow for

keeping track of data and information and guiding a healthy living in people's daily life. It also

enables users to work their smartphones much easier without having to grab the smartphones in

hand.

One of the big advances demonstrated in this new smart wristband is the bringing together of a

variety of different recent technological innovations, creating a singular and cost-effective

wearable capable of capturing biomedical information that previously needed expensive and

bulky lab equipment to measure. This prototype includes a microfluidic sensor, a microcontroller

and a Bluetooth module, all built into a superhero-style wristband.

"It's like a Fitbit but has a biosensor that can count particles, so that includes blood cells, bacteria

and organic or inorganic particles in the air," explains Mehdi Javanmard, senior author of the

new study.

The current device demonstrates effective measurements of blood cells delivered into a

microfluidic sensor. At this stage the blood samples must be separately gathered via a pin-prick

process, but the researchers suggest that a future goal would be to incorporate either tiny micro

needles or catheter-based impedance sensors into the wristband, so it can continuously monitor

specific blood levels.

"There's a whole range of diseases where blood cell counts are very important," says Javanmard.

"Abnormally high or low white blood cell counts are indicators of certain cancers like leukemia,

for example."

As Javanmard also suggests, the system is designed to be easily modified to sense a variety of

different health biomarkers and potentially also airborne environmental hazards. "To detect

airborne particles, we could add a module to sample air, or perhaps pre-concentrate air particles

in liquid, and then run the device," says Javanmard.

The rapid pace of technological development in miniaturizing and automating blood testing

systems that previously needed labor-intensive analytical techniques was demonstrated by a

separate team from Rutgers back in June, with the reveal of an automated system for drawing

and analyzing blood samples. That impressive device, again utilizing microfluidic sensor

platforms, was a self-contained robotic system that both takes blood samples, and instantly

analyzes them.

This new wearable device is a little more limited in what it can initially sense, but the overall

system promises easily interchangeable microfluidic channels designed to sense whatever

biomarker a person needs. The entire architecture of the system, including its ability to transfer

data directly to an associated smartphone, points to exciting future potential for personalized

wearable devices that can be tailored to individual needs, with data easily transferred to

clinicians for remote observations.

The proposed system consists of two modules: fear sensing system & Android based mobile

phone. The first module consists of a pulse monitor and a wearable skin conductance sensor,

whose properties change when a person is in fear or experiences anxiety. As we know pulse rate

increases with fear due to the secretion of adrenaline, by sensing a change in the pulse rate, one

can figure out if the person is in danger. Another factor is the skin conductance. Since sweat is an

electrolyte and a good conductor of electricity the conductance of the skin will increase with

sweating. A person tends to sweat when in an unfavourable situation like this; by detecting

small changes in the conductance of the skin an appropriate decision can be taken.

Once it is established that the person is in danger, the proposed fear sensing system strobes

Android based mobile phone to send a message to preselected number. Simultaneously a few

capacitors in fear sensing system start charging and all ready to discharge into the attacker who

makes a physical contact with the victim. However this electrical shock is good enough to

incapacitate the attacker for a good few seconds which are crucial for fight or flight and not

damage any part of the body.

The next section gives an overall idea about the interfacing of different components. Section 3

describes our approach to use different sensors for the detection of fear and anxiety and sending

the information wirelessly. Section 4 presents the data flow diagram of the system. We finish

the paper with conclusions and future directions.

BLOCK DIAGRAM

The block diagram of the proposed system is shown in figure 1 and figure 2.

The system is designed by interfacing different modules such as skin conductance sensor, pulse

monitor sensor and a Bluetooth module as shown above.

Fig 2: Block diagram showing Android mobile phone to send text message.
 DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

When a person becomes mentally, emotionally, or physically aroused, a response is triggered in

one’s skin. This is known as Electro Dermal Response (EDR) and this response can be used as

an indicator of one's level of excitement. This phenomenon is known as sympathetic response,

and is commonly referred to as "Fight or Flight." During excitation, in accordance with the

sympathetic response, sweat glands in the skin fill with sweat, a weak electrolyte and good

conductor.[2] This results in many low-resistance parallel pathways, thereby increasing the

conductivity of the skin. The basic purpose of skin conductance sensor would be to convert skin

conductance measurements to voltage levels which the microcontroller samples periodically at

discrete points in time.

Most of the light is absorbed or reflected by our organs and tissues (skin, bone, muscle, blood),

but some light will pass through our tissues if they are thin enough. When blood is pumped

through your body, it gets squeezed into the capillary tissues, and the volume of those tissues

increases very slightly. Then, between heart beats, the volume decreases. The change in volume

affects the amount of light that will transmit through. This fluctuation is very small, but

we can sense it with electronics. An Infrared LED and a photodiode sensor are used that is referred

as pulse monitor sensor in fig-1. It is important that the two devices are matched well, so that

the light wavelength output from the LED is detected strongly by the photodiode. It will

generate a small voltage and current when it is blasted with photons. The next thing done is to

amplify the signal coming from the photodiode. A Current to voltage converter is implemented

for the purpose. When high voltage is applied to the muscle, it scrambles the electrical pulses

sent from the brain to other parts of the body. When these electrical impulses are disrupted, it
results to the temporary shutdown of our body’s electrical system thus temporarily paralyzing the

attacker. This period causes confusion, giving her the opportunity to run away and to find help.

Stun guns generate a high-voltage, low-amperage electrical charge. When the stun gun is

pressed against an attacker, the charge passes into the attacker's body. Since it has a fairly high

voltage, the charge will pass through heavy clothing and skin. But at this low amperage, the

charge is not intense enough to damage the attacker's body unless it is applied for extended

periods of time.

Using the concept, we plan to incorporate a bank of capacitors which start to charge as soon as they

get the control signal from the microcontroller. The leads of capacitor are sticking out of the

wrist band. If the attacker makes a physical contact, a large amount of charge discharges through the

body of the perpetuator stunning him momentarily.

The heart of the system is a low power, high performance microcontroller The duty of the MCU

is to monitor the data received from the sensors and establish if the person is in danger and

wirelessly communicate to the mobile phone using Bluetooth module and also output a control

signal to start the charging of capacitors.

We are using a Bluetooth module shown in fig-2, which can wirelessly transmit information

to the Bluetooth module in the mobile phone. Instead of interfacing the GSM module to the

microcontroller used in the wrist band and make it bulky, we are using a mobile phone which

everyone carries around today. The data is sent from the microcontroller to the Bluetooth

module via the UART. This module wirelessly sends information via Bluetooth to the phone.

The installed application acts on the information received and sends SOS text messages to prelisted

numbers.
DATA F LOW DIAGRAM

The skin conductance sensor and pulse monitor sensors will be taking the values in regular

intervals. When these values are above the threshold value, then it’s considered as the occurrence of an

event and further actions are carried out. Immediately the central processing unit, the microcontroller

sends commands wirelessly via Bluetooth to the user mobile, application receives the data. And it

analyses the data and sends emergency messages to the pre stored mobile numbers. In the

meantime, the processor also starts the charging of the capacitors. The figure 3 shows the working

of the system through the flow diagram.

Fig 3:Data flow graph showing the working of the device

Most of the mobile operating systems give the freedom to the developers to develop

application using the mobile resources. The application will be a window for us to interact

with the mobile hardware. The task of the application is to receive the wireless data and

respond to the data by sending the pre-stored text as well as the current information to the

numbers. We’ll be using Android platform.

Application can be designed for other mobile operating systems as well. Using the application

we are also making the efficient use of the smartphones. Since most of the phones are equipped

with a Bluetooth module, the Application running on the phone receives information that the person

is in danger via the Bluetooth module interfaced to the microcontroller. Using the GPS in the

phone, it traces the location of the attack. It then sends a common SOS text message to all the

prelisted numbers along with the location.

 CONCLUSION

This paper has proposed a method to develop a portable and easily wearable device interfacing

pulse monitor sensors and skin conductance sensor to sense the fear or anxiety and a bank of

capacitors that are ready to shock the assailant if they come in close contact. This information

about the attack is sent as messages to emergency numbers using smart phone.

The proposed system is capable of constantly monitoring the state of the user’s mind using the

data from the skin conductance and pulse monitor sensors.

The stun gun helps even the physically weak users overpower their assailants by introducing an

element of surprise by shocking them though the shock is not lethal. The estimated cost of the

device won’t be very high since we make use of available user’s smartphone (not added to the

cost of the device) and a few capacitors and sensors making safety affordable.

A few challenges would be to generate sufficient voltage for the capacitors to shock since

batteries are used. It is important that we include a few power management techniques to

improve the overall performance and effectiveness of the device. The reliability of sensors to the

real-time situations will also be a parameter to consider. Given the network infrastructure in our

country, the information about the attack might not reach as soon as it takes place in the adverse

network conditions. However this is subjective to the service provider and the geographical

location of the attack.