LEV is a kitchen appliance that provides an intuitive cooking experience for MCI patients while alleviating the caregiving strain of their caregivers.

Client: Emory Brain Health Center

Role: Industrial Design, Experience Design, Model Making, User Research, UI prototyping

Team: Sungtae Kim, Jonathan Moon, Daniel Derochers, Tommy Schmelze

Duration: 16 weeks

Background

What is MCI?

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a condition that affects 15-20% of adults over the age of 65. While MCI is a precursory stage to Dementia and Alzheimer’s, it does not necessarily progress into the latter.

MCI can affect people in functions like memory, decision-making, executive function, and complex task management.

Insights: Patient

Needs Hand Holding

Patients find it difficult to remember what step of the recipe they’re on, know where an ingredient is, or if they even ate their meal.

Needs Manageable Stimuli

They get overwhelmed with too many steps, especially those that are spaced out across the kitchen.

Wants Sense of Independence

Patients have lost confidence since the diagnosis due to their reliance on their caregiver.

Insights: Caregiver

Needs Extra Eyes

Caregivers want to monitor patients even while at work to make sure they’re eating on time (currently uses GPS tracker).

Needs Extra Set of Hands

Cooking is tedious. They want to be able to hand off some meal responsibilities to the patient, but don’t feel comfortable doing so.

Wants their patient’s happiness

Caregivers are aware of how their patients perceive themselves post MCI diagnosis. They want to bring back a patient’s sense of independence.

Introducing LEV

to minimize the caregivers’ worry and enable patients to be able to cook on their own.

Caregiver Journey

LEV acts as a medium between the caregiver and patient by enabling the caregiver to prep the meal for the patient and hand it off from there.

01. A quick and organized start

To start, the caregiver selects a meal to prep for MCI patients from the LEV app by following the instructions on the tablet.

02. A compact, transformative workspace

LEV’s door and handle transforms into a cutting board, enabling the caregiver to start prepping right away.

03. Simple set up process

Food prep is done in no time, as the caregiver quickly assigns each ingredient to an alphabet. This saves the prep information to the system.

04. One step disposal

After prepping, the caregiver sweeps the food waste into the disposal tray and closes the door. They then push in the colored base to pop out the tray for clean up.

05. Providing a peace of mind

The caregiver can now leave for work, reassured that guidance is in place for when the patient cooks their meal.

06. Integrated cooling to keep lasting, fresh ingredients

Due to LEV’s upper cooling unit, perishable ingredients are kept fresh as they would be in a mini fridge.

07. Progress Notifications

LEV notifies the caregiver which step of the process the patient is at, such as whether they have started or finished cooking. This provides the caregiver an extra set of eyes on the patient’s activities, even when they are out of the home.

MCI Patient Journey

01. Visual and auditory cues to alert meal times

When it’s time for a meal, LEV wakes up, and displays and speaks the meal of the day to alert the patient. The transparent compartments also serve as a visual cue to remind the patient he has not cooked his meal yet.

02. Intuitive lighting guidance and concise, visual instructions

To prevent patients from forgetting or losing the location of each ingredient, integrated LEDs on each compartment highlight the needed ingredient every step of the way. Each instruction is only one sentence, which also helps lessen the patient’s cognitive load.

03. Feel empowered

The patient can now successfully and safely cook on their own and enjoy meals in timely manner. With LEV, they feel empowered, as they are now taking over their caregiver’s cooking responsibility.

Process

Initial concepts

Because some patients often miss eating prepared, refrigerated meals due to the overwhelming stimuli in the fridge, we came up with several refrigerated prep station concepts that emphasize different types of features (visual indications, transparent storage, etc.) After receiving user feedback, we then picked the most useful features, and combined them for our refined prep station concept.