Designed for Ease

Charmr

Adaptive Path

San Francisco design-strategy consultancy Adaptive Path is perhaps best known for its user-centered interactive design and Web projects. This summer, its designers spent nine weeks creating a concept for a small diabetes-management device that has the usability and appeal of a consumer electronics product such as the iPod Shuffle. The goal was to apply Adaptive Path's knowledge of and experience with interactive design to create an engaging medical device that would be easy to use—and therefore encourage consistent usage and more effective disease management. Consisting of two parts, the Charmr concept is envisioned as a wearable insulin pump along with a controller designed with inventive visual cues, such as a power meter that looks like an insulin syringe. Charmr can be plugged into a flash drive to quickly and easily upload a diabetic's health data so he can monitor patterns, as well as transmit information to doctors for medical analysis.