Introduction

Gulp Band is a body dehydration detection product which helps you “sweat smart”. The product detects user’s hydration status from user’s sweat, and reflect user by bangle’s color change.

Best Entrepreneurial Team, Wellbeing Innovation Camp 2014, EIT ICT Labs

Information

Time: 2 weeks, 2014 Aug

Team Member: Shaun Mulligan, Norbert Juhász, Hongjie Li

Collaboration: Holst Center, Netherland

Skills: Design ideation, business models, concept generation, market research .

Project Background

The focus of the workshop is Health & Wellbeing with emphasis on ways to foster a healthy lifestyle, emphasis is on developing a marketing strategy and business plan for the product provided by case owner.

The cases covered both applications in the domains of physical and mental wellbeing with social inclusion as an important aspect.

Design Research

Dehydration is a top 3 causes of hospitalization during music festival.

Since most of the music festivals take place in summer, which means people sweat, drink and move a lot. All these actions take away the water from human body. Since the symptoms of dehydration occurs slowly and not significantly, it’s also hard to get early detection from others.

Market Analysis

A large amount of music festivals are organized every year, especially in Europe.

In 2014, over 200 music festivals are held in UK, includes over 3 000 000 attendees. Meanwhile, the number of hospitalization is also increasing by the year. In 2014 Woodstock Festival which created 500,000 attendance, 5162 people need medical treatment. Among these, dehydration is a top 3 most common causes.

Concept

We integrated Ion Sensor (Provided by Holst) into the bangle which young people love to wear during music festivals. Based on the ions of K+, Na+ in the sweat, the sensor can indicate the user’s dehydration status.

If the user’s dehydration status gets higher, the bangle would switch its color to warn the user take appropriate measures.

Pilot

The campaign would be aimed at getting Heineken or another large alcohol beverage company to use our bangles as a promotional incentive.

Our bangle technology would be packaged and branded along with beer at a few selected summer festivals throughout Europe. The goal in this direct sales drive would be to present our data and demonstrate how our product could improve the overall enjoyment of the attendees.