“I actually started in computer engineering because I wanted to design things and start a business,” Khorramabadi said. “I really cared about creating a physical product that could make someone’s life better.”
The road couldn’t have been more different for McIltrot, a fourth-year biomedical engineering student. She came to campus wanting to pursue medicine and research. Entrepreneurship was the last thing on her mind.
“During my freshman year, I thought I wanted to go to med school, but then I fell out of love with that idea and fell into love with more of the engineering side of things,” McIltrot said. “I actually liked creating new things and having an impact on a broader scale, so I stayed highly involved with research… but then the entrepreneurial world just came at me.”
Khorramabadi and McIltrot’s interests and backgrounds created a great match. During the summer of 2020, the two friends were sitting outside on a porch discussing McIltrot’s research related to the geriatric population’s high risk of falling.
“We thought to ourselves — why don’t we do something about this?” McIltrot said. “We started with that small seed — the question ‘why do elderly people fall all the time?’ — and over a year later, we now have a real product to fix that technology gap.”
The journey leading to their first prototype, let alone the product that exists today, was not easy. The team faced three main challenges regarding the ideation, implementation, and execution of their gait tracking device.
“The first was understanding the customer to understand the regulatory constraints, as well as everything that goes on in that ecosystem. The second was designing [the device] right and figuring out what data can we get off of this thing. Finally, we asked ‘what can we do with that data and how can it be displayed in a meaningful way?’ Those three things were really hard,” Khorramabadi said.
Before even attempting to design a product, Khorramabadi and McIltrot spent six months researching and interviewing various physical therapists. They wanted to understand how they conducted gaited analysis without any aiding technology and what their needs were.
“A lot of people design first without talking to their customer, but that’s the biggest mistake you can make,” Khorramabadi said. “In fact, it’s a guaranteed mistake if you are an engineer designing for someone in a completely different profession, like healthcare, because you really don’t understand what you think you do.”
Source: https://www.coe.gatech.edu/news/2022/01/create-x-team-makes-big-strides-new-wearable-technology