Being able to properly take care of and understand your health is an incredibly hard challenge. In a fast-paced and success-driven society, we push and push our bodies without really being able to know what sort of impact our decisions have on our health. Whether it's an over-reliance on caffeine, not going to the doctor when necessary, or ignoring the signs that something is off, our habits can take a quiet but significant toll. Without accessible, clear, and personalized insight into our wellbeing, it’s easy to overlook the small daily choices that ultimately shape our long-term health. What if a simple, everyday habit, like drinking water, could be the solution to building healthier routines, improving overall wellness, and making it easier to understand what your body truly needs?
Ottle is a smart water bottle that uses the power of hydration and water supplements to allow users to take ownership over their health and wellness. The bottle can track water and vitamin intake and sync this data to a companion mobile app that shows hydration history, recommended supplement intake, and personalized reminders. Vitamin supplements have an incredibly strong potential to enhance one's health, but without any way to track intake and learn what's best for your nutritional needs, they can easily become inconsistent, ineffective, or even counterproductive. A personalized tracking system that measures water and vitamin consumption in relation to diet, fitness levels, and environmental factors could bridge this gap and tap the potential that hydration and vitamin supplements can have on empowering indivduals to understand their health.
I've thought a lot about this project and put together this advertisement-like web page that expresses what my idea is and how it intends to help people. Unfortunately, I'm now in one of those stages that is all too familiar to designers: having a cool idea, but lacking the engineering and technical skills to bring that idea to life. It is the very worst and most frustrating limitation on being a designer :( However, I have started to teach and familiarize myself with the technology needed to develop a prototype (things like Arudino programming and ESP32 technology), and I am eager to find a way that I can bring the skills and mindset I carry as a product designer to the actualization of this idea :) More to come!
