What's The Problem?

User of the Axiom H2 machine need a way to monitor their over-all health, while they they receive hydrogen therapy, in order to take an active approach toward improving their symptoms and/or their lives.

Who's Using This Product

The product has three main users—athletes / biohackers, chronic sufferers, and preventative users. Out of these three, the majority of users, by a wide margin, are the chronic sufferers, mainly people who suffer from auto-immune diseases like lupus.

My Role(s)

UX Research | UX Design

What About the Scope?

This project consisted of designing a companion iOS app for a hydrogen therapy machine. I also needed to research users to find out the priority of features.

What Are We Working With?

The Axiom H2 machine produces molecular hydrogen. It’s odorless and tasteless. You can inhale the hydrogen through your nose, apply the hydrogen to your eyes, or through your ear canal, for brain health. You can also use the machine, with an attachment, to create your own hydrogen enriched water.

My stakeholder, the owner of the company, is selling the machine as a therapeutic device to a variety of users.

What's Going on Out There

The Axiom H2 machine has a lot of competitors out there, but they all do basically the same thing. The key differences are mostly in terms of advertising and marketing.

There are currently no apps based around hydrogen therapy, for any machine. Also, all the machines are “dumb” – meaning that they offer no connectivity to track data or the state of the machine.

And I wanted to start my research from the ground floor, up.

Initial Problem Statement

How might we design a companion app for a hydrotherapy machine (w/o connectivity) that can could serve user needs?

I wanted to follow this problem statement as far as it could go.

The Domain and The Science

Hydrogen, besides being the most abundant element on earth, has a lot to offer.

I had to do some foundational research into hydrogen therapy and it's benefits, which were the following:

Antioxidant Activity
Anti-Inflammatory
Effects Gene Expression
Immune Modulation
Safe / Not New‍

Pre-User Research

So, how do we measure hydrogen therapy effectiveness?

My stakeholder, the CEO, explained about the three categories of customers he had.

1) Athletic recovery and biohacking customers, of which there were not many.
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2) People suffering from chronic conditions, that are receptive to alternative, healing therapies.

3) And finally, people who use hydrogen as a preventative measure.

1) They like hard data, data from other wearables, like respiratory rates and blood o2 saturation numbers.

2) These users are most concerned about staying “young”. They could monitor their “cellular age” through epigenetic testing, which we’ll revisit later.

3) These folks have probably exhausted the limits of the current medical system and are looking for relief on their own terms, so monitoring and self-reported metrics of their symptoms may prove useful.

Qualitative User Research

I wanted to conduct actual user research, to learn more about the machine’s users.

I found 5 of them.

I spoke with them about their background, why they use the machine and how often they use it. If they were trying to heal from something, I asked them what symptoms they might have.

Key Findings

1) Mostly used as healing from autoimmune disease, like lupus.

2) All owners expressed interest in epigenetic testing, but wanted more information about it.

3) All user’s want to improve their health, and the machine may be just one element.

A Useful Persona

I wanted to concentrate my efforts to solve problems for the majority of actual users.I was able to create a persona that would prove useful.

New Problem, New Direction

Once I could take a step back and study my research, I formulated a new problem statement so I could have a narrower focus going forward.

After discussing with the CEO, he agreed this was a strong course of action to follow.

Competitive Research

Once I could look at the problem from a wider perspective, the perspective of over-all health, I could also look for examples from indirect competitors.

The cancer.net app proved a very useful study, showing a way that I could structure the Axiom app around a health dashboard of sorts.

I gathered a list of common symptoms for autoimmune disease sufferers, things like anxiety, fatigue, constipation, etc...These symptoms are really just a starting point, though. There is also a space for the user to name, and therefore, track a symptom of their choosing. Once the user selects a symptom, and date (with a current time default) they can quickly rate the severity.

This data will be logged and can be referred to on the dashboard.

Tracking Hydrogen Usage

No matter what kind of user you are. Hydrogen intake is what makes this app unique.

Users can easily select their intake type and time from convenient, predetermined intervals. Once they log their event, the data is stored and can be referred to on the dashboard.

This dashboard is where all the logged data can be seen in a visual representation. Of course you can apply different to the graph, based on H2 delivery methods, timeframes, etc…This data can be downloaded and shared, allowing users the ability to connect with each other over individual successes and failures.

The Crowning Touch

Logging data and tracking graphs is all well and good, however, the living beating heart of the app is the dashboard--where all the data comes together, to help thew user.

At the very top of the dashboard we have trends and reminders.

Trends are just factoids of data movement direction. For example – they could report on symptoms that are improving or hydrogen use that is declining or point out the correlations between medications and symptoms.

Reminders, on the other hand, kind of goad the user into taking actions – like reminding the user to change the filter of the machine (every two weeks), or reminding the user to continue to log their symptoms after a delay. Reminders could be extrapolated into OS notifications, as well.

On Track For Success

Since I still had access to users from the initial interviews, I reached out to see if anyone would test the prototype--and a few did. They indicated that they could see this app being useful.

"This would let me manage my symptoms, just a little better, and maybe help me gain control of my lupus."

Lessons and Reflections

This was a short, explorative project. Axiom may go forward with the app or they may not. I, however, learned a lot in the design process. I really had to push past the initial problem (of tracking hydrogen usage) until I got a broader view of things. Once I was able to see a user, with their needs and frustrations, I could begin looking for comparable solutions. Then, I still needed to implement a fresh system to bring everything together, which would be the dashboard.

In retrospect a dashboard is obvious, but it was only going through the entire process that I understood the dashboard's true meaning and usage. Because I used a methodical design process, once I got to the dashboard element, I could feel the usefulness of the solution, relative to the project constraints. And that was a good feeling.

If Axiom chooses to move forward, they would really have to focus their engineering on creating the logic for the dashboard's reminders and trends. Again, these are the key and what give the app some actual "legs."

Axiom H2 Hydrogen Therapy App