Drowning has become the 3rd unintentional death cause in the world. According to data from World Health Organization, 37200 people die from drowning every year, which means 42 people die every hour per day.
We mapped out various time zone when a person is drowning, starting from pre-event to afterwards.
And then we summarize our argument as:
How Might We enable drowing people to communicate with lifeguards and help lifeguards save lifes in such a short time emergency situation with easy access and understanding of basic but important information?
After ideating about the placement and function of our products, we came to a conclusion that our device should aim for low-tech, portalable and easy to activate.
Then together with our team members from Advanced Product Design, we started to prototype on the physical form of our device.
Also, we discussed our intial ideas about our digital information including interfaces and sounds. Our expectation to them can be described as:
Simple and intuitive;
Pleasant but tense;
Emergency but not panic;
After we had our first sketches on everything, we arranged a test session with students from UID to see if our ideas work well or not.
View our whole process in this video🐾
Our user scenario mainly can be divided into two kind of situations.
First one is about prediction. If some people accidentally swim into the NO-GO area, they will receive a gentle notification on their device just to inform them to go back.
Considered this is not an urgent case, the lifeguard will also just receive a gentle reminder sound on their tablet, together with interface showning the exact location of these people.
Second, also our prime user scenario is about emergency.
Let's meet our user group representitive Tom and dive into the using journey of our service by following a day of Tom at the beach.
Tom comes to beach on a sunny day and he first puts all his personal stuff in the locker beside the beach and uses RUSH's function as key to the locker.
Then he aims directly to the sea. But he is not professional in surfing enough, so when a huge wave comes Tom was swept into the sea by the wave and couldn't come back to surface by his own force.
In this case, Tom triggers RUSH by himself but RUSH can also be activated automatically as the sensors attached to people's skin collects body data and estimate if this person is in urgency or not.
As soon as Tom triggers RUSH, the lifeguard get a strong notification from his tablet. By using the AR version, this helps lifeguard to locate the drowning person exactly and rapidly. Then the lifeguard jumps straightly into the sea and swims towards Tom.
Under the water, the lifeguard is guided by the spatial audio in his bone conduction headsets which continousy gives him feedback about which direction he should be heading.
As he approaches Tom, the frequency of the sound in his headset also changes indicating that the person is nearby. Besides, the sound and light made by Tom's RUSH are other elements that helps the lifeguard to locate him.
Considering our device's function and it's nature of emergency, we named the product RUSH and created LOGO for it. Origins from chinese character ' 冲' which means toward, we changed the form of this character to the wristband version of RUSH.
For lifeguards, the interface shows rough location of every person wearing this device and the safe area boundaries in the sea.
When emergency happens, lifeguards can hold the button at the lower right side and scan the sea using the AR function.
The interface shows where the drowning person is, how much time has they been in this situation and where this person is floating to. It also shows the fastest route and the water entering point lifeguards should take to save a person's life.
Underwater, lifeguards have limited eyesight. But we also prepare him with the interface on his watch shows real-time direction and also drowning time for afterwards medical support.
RUSH can be more than a wrist band. By using the clip on its back, you can place it also on everywhere on your clothes.
In this project, I had the opportunity to engage with sound design tools for the first time and also communication skills. The outcome of the project is firmly rooted in the evidence gathered through our prototyping process.
This approach has provided me with deeper insights into my own workflow, enhancing my understanding and capabilities in both sound design and effective communication.