The denser our concrete jungle becomes the more relevant is the cause of creating an efficient indoor navigation system. Navigation, however, was an even bigger problem in hospitals than we realised. The real struggle were those that were not in immediate life threatening situations but still found it very difficult to find the specific doctor, X-ray room or department.

We embarked on a journey to identify potential solutions to solve this problem in order to increase efficiency of patients, doctors and hospital staff.

After conducting extensive desk research and on field, we realised that hospitals had very localised signages and peoples first instinct was to ask someone nearby for help.

We explored several public & private hospitals in Mumbai to better understand the problem and to test the system ourselves, we tried going to certain departments. Even with hand drawn map navigating was an uphill battle. We were clearly onto something.

We started with identifying personas and creating user journeys. We took a bold step of not going with an app as a solution as it was too mainstream and the obvious choice ahead. Besides that, based on our findings, we identified that the solution should be easy to use and should be able to communicate despite the language barriers.

Through various brainstorming exercises, we dabbled with product concepts spanning across all 5 senses as indicators, wearable technology, hospital kiosks and interactive signage. After an immense round of prototyping, we arrived at our final idea by marrying different elements from various ideas into one concept.

Disha is a dissolvable bandaid-like sticker made of 3 main components; a dissolvable microprocessor, a light emitting diode LED paint and zinc air batteries that displays directions to guide you to your intended location. The technology leveraged were the WiFi routers inside these structures that transmit and receive signals from the patch to triangulate points and determine the directions.

We focused on user friendliness to use such that it doesn’t alter the current behaviour while walking around in large structures and ensured that we considered the impact on the environment.

Through this project, we pushed the boundaries of our solutions by committing against a digital product; which was the obvious choice for way-finding. We received recognition at a global scale at Dubai Design Week 2020 and the Global Grad Show and interest from various medical institutes and private investors.

‍Learnings from this project
‍• Pushing our boundaries for out of the box thinking
• Minimise the learning curve for users with new solutions
• In case of emergencies, people behave unknowingly
• Keep it simple, it will last longer
• Don’t be afraid of failing as it will only limit the thought