Odapt | Ivana Llobet Leca
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Detailed Description
Patients living with an ostomy bag experience frequent stool or urine leaks due to the misadjustment of the current bags to the different shapes of stomas. Odapt is the first personalized 3D printed wafer designed to avoid leaks by perfectly adapting to the user’s anatomy and preferences.
Project Details
- Does your design take social and cultural challenges and human wellbeing into consideration?
Several co-design workshops were performed to reach the envisioned solution. First, to identify and empathise with the day-to-day problems of the people living with a stoma, a 200 people quality of life survey was launched, identifying leakage as the main problem. A social listening of 9000 conversations around ostomy bag challenges was also conducted. Secondly, in the ideation and prototyping phases, workshops involving users and several in depth interviews with healthcare professionals were done to reach a meaningful prototype. In Odapt, we consider crucial to involve users in every step along the way and co-create with them. As every person is unique, also is their stoma.
On top of that, Odapt is not only a service used to improve the wafer design, but also a community of people in similar circumstances that can share their experience and actively participate improving the design experience.
- Does your design support sustainable production, embodying circular or regenerative design practices?
With Odapt we aim to redesign the actual ostomy bag experience, making it safer, more inclusive, sustainable and accessible. Users will still use their preferred pouch and only change the wafer for a customised one (Odapt).
- Does your design use principles of distribution and open source?
With Odapt, we offer a “Do It Yourself” (DIY) option where the user feels empowered to design its own wafer. All the design process, from the image obtained when scanning the patient’s stoma to the criteria used to design the wafer, is fully transparent to the user. The image acquisition used to create the wafer design is done using a smartphone through a commercial app and can be performed anywhere in the world by the user.
The standardized 3D digital file containing the wafer design is ready to be printed in any homologated 3D printer around the world, making the solution accessible locally and replicable wherever is needed.
- Does your design promote awareness of responsible design and consumption?
From the cultural and social point of view, Odapt is personalised to all the dimensions of the patient, from their anatomical particularities but also to their skin colour, size preferences and to any type of pouch brand available in their country. Odapt also aims to increase public awareness of people living with an ostomy bag by organizing workshops with non-ostomy bag users, by pitching at international well-known events (Mobile World Congress, Formnext…).
When it comes to creating a community and a sense of belonging, Odapt’s app also counts with an open space for experience sharing from users which is then cross-checked by a stoma nurse that shares tips.
Finally, from the sustainability point of view, Odapt is changing the current “use and throw” solution, offering a sustainable approach and reducing the impact on the environment. Currently, people change their wafers every 2-3 days, some do it even daily. This creates a huge quantity of medical, non-recyclable waste. With Odapt, we eliminate this waste, with a reusable wafer that can last for months and can be easily disinfected by washing it with soap and water, for a quicker operation, or boiling it, for a more thorough disinfection, and for continued use.
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