Jack

Travel Baby Monitor

3rd Year, 4 Months

My first major project in my third year was to perform an iterative design on a baby monitor. This used a comprehensive design process with four main stages including initial research, user testing, definitive design, and final design. The objective of this course was to submit a process book to the Global Innovation Awards student competition. I had a lot of fun going through this process described below.

Initial Research

Market Analysis

As I knew very little about baby monitors, I started my project by opening up Google and researching different baby monitors on the market. Making the spreadsheet below helped me gain a general understanding of the current state of baby monitors, their features, and reviews.

User Interviews

After market research, I interviewed parents with babies from 3 to 24 months old. This was a crucial part of my process as I was able to gain an understanding of what it is like to be a parent using a baby monitor.

One area that stood out was the idea users need to travel with baby monitors as this is not a focus of current products on the market and parents mentioned they travel a lot with their babies.

Product Tear-Down

To deepen my understanding of baby monitors, I bought the VTech VM350 to do a product tear-down. This helped me understand how this type of product is manufactured with its internal components. I then used these findings to design my baby monitor to fit these manufacturing restraints.

VTech VM350-2 5 inch Digital Video Baby Monitor with 2 Cameras.jpg

Ideation

Concepts

Initial concepts were sketched to explain my ideas to my instructor and class for feedback. These were made while considering the following personas:

Persona 1

A parent with 1 to 2 children from the ages of 0 to 36 months.
Likes to travel to cottages and camp with family.
Needs to bring a baby monitor on travels and set it up in different locations.
Worried about the product breaking in travel.
Want the baby monitor to look “cute”.

Persona 2

A parent with 1 to 2 children from the ages of 0 to 36 months.
Also has parents 60 to 80 years of age who regularly take care of the children. Parents have some dexterity and sensory limitations
Needs a baby monitor that works for many users with ease.
Wants this product to reduce the stress of parenting.

Testing

With feedback from fellow designers, I focused on the clamp and parent unit (user interface) for testing. I asked users to try out different clamps to see what type of mounting systems. Users were also asked to wrap a cable wire around an unfamiliar object as an alternative mounting method. For the interface, I made foam blocks to represent to size of the parent unit and printed out different interface configurations. Participants were asked to hold the parent unit with different interfaces and provide feedback. Testing helped me answer many unknowns I had from my concepts.

To properly utilize my variety of research findings from user testing, I decided to use an infinity diagram. This exercise helped me organize the findings and figure out where to go moving to definitive design. The key takeaways (as shown) shaped the rest of the project.

Analysis

Definitive Desing

Personas

As I transitioned to definitive design, I recreated my personas to reflect my user testing research. As you can see, these paint a more holistic picture the many users affected by baby monitors.

Concepts

I started my definitive design by sketching the different components I wanted to create including parent unit, camera, bendable extension, and camera. These were designed around the key principles shown below.

Final Desing

Form Development

Moving into Solidworks, I started with modeling the internals of the camera and worked around them. My first form was based on my definitive design yet I had issues blending in the axes. I then switched to a curvilinear form to hide these pivot points. The rest of the components were then modeled to match this form.

For the moment you have all been waiting for... My final design was 3D printed to prove my concept. I am super happy with my model as all moving components work perfectly!

Final CAD

All said and done, I am happy with my design. This project taught me how important it is to have a systematic design process. I found it thrilling to see how the research pushed the design. Thank you for taking the time to review my project, I hope you enjoyed my process as much as I did!