Xhale

Xhale - the concept of a new sleep apnea device

Twenty-six percent of people between the ages of 30 and 70 suffer from sleep apnea. It’s a disorder where breathing is repeatedly interrupted during the sleep. Patients snore loudly and feel tired even after a full night of sleep. Our device a CPAP device helps sleep apnea patients to better their condition.

The process

At first we analysed the AirSense 10 by documenting the first use, conducting interviews with users, developing information structures of the device and a stakeholder analysis. Searching for problems within the existing device.

Product Vision

Afterwards we defined our product vision:
“For the sleep apnea patients, who often face insufficient support and education about their condition, our user friendly CPAP device is redesigned and improved, to really support and inform patients about their therapy, in order to give them more control, satisfaction and ultimately enable them an easier compliance.”

Concept

Based on our product vision we came up with a concept for our final prototype and the screen design.

• To improve the ergonomics, our prototype has a 45° angle.
• Bigger buttons and a bigger touchscreen support accessibility for typical user tasks. We decided on a dark theme for the screen to be pleasing on the eyes when used in the night.
• We implemented three different stages of expertise: beginner, intermediate and advanced. Depending on what stage you choose, you get more settings and more information or less.

User Flows

To help clarify our redesign/work a bit this semester we have some help from Thomas our Intermediate and Marla our Beginner.

Thomas wakes up in the morning and looks at his device. There he sees that he had a not so good night today. The device tells him to look at his sleep report. The device also reminds him that he should clean again. He clicks away the reminder, opens the sleep report and there he sees his last night summarised. He gets his data broken down by hour, to his mask and his general progress in therapy the last few days. He toggles through and notices that his AHI is progressing. To that he realises: the mask fit this night was not good. It was partially leaking. He also clearly detects from the arrow with the orange colouring that the mask fit has worsened compared to last night and that the amount of water he lost due to the poor mask fit was relatively high. The device interprets this nicely for him.

Since Thomas is somewhat familiar with his therapy, he knows that there could be several reasons for this. He washes his mask and turns the humidification down a bit for the next night, just to be on the safe side. He also changes from a small ramp to the car ramp because of the changed humidification, so that his ventilation remains comfortable for him with despite the low humidification level.

Marla puts on her mask in the evening, to be sure everything is fine she does a mask test. Her first attempt is not good, the device says try to adjust your mask here.
Second attempt of the test, everything fits and Marla falls asleep.

In the morning she wakes up and looks at the device, everything is fine.
She still inspects her sleep report. The last night seemed to be quite normal. She changes the ramp once because her doctor said she could try different settings too. As she changes the ramp to 40 minutes she notices that auto ramp seemed to be good for her and she puts it back up.