Smart Exo

SmartExo was a short term incubation project, that has been presented to HP leadership as a proposal to extend portfolio offering of the company. Work has been performed by small multidisciplinary team formed by R&D, Product Marketing and User Experience disciplines, where my responsibilities included: Design research, Workflow design and Business strategy design.

Problem statement.

 

What do you imagine when thinking of future manufacturing, building construction or any other heavy industry? I’m almost sure what came to your mind are fully automated dark factories filled with advanced robotics. And you’re completely right, but you might over-estimated how close this future is.

Based on McKinsey report 87 percent of the hours spent on activities performed by workers in production occupations are automatable but we’re still at least 50 years away from doing that, so what stops us?

To answer this question, we worked on SmartExo - an innovation project, meant to rethink how we approach the workforce in heavy industry environment and help to accelerate its full automation.

Understanding the problem.

After initial desk-research spent in analysing latests trends and industry reports, we found out that:

  • Businesses and insurance companies spend over $643,7 billions per year to cover costs of preventable medical injuries happening at the workplace worldwide.

  • Only in USA, companies spending $4.4 trillions annually on accelerating the automation, almost half of which is targeted to increment of workers productivity.

As they say, you need to follow the money, so to understand why this is happening, we interviewed several specialists in different areas, including EHS departments of heavy industry companies, certification agencies and robotic experts.

That helped us to discover following insights:

  1. There is a lack of dataset, including active behavioural skills, to enable quick robotics adoption.

  2. Currently there is a variety of aids destined to reduce amount of accidents and injuries in heavy industry, yet there is a lack of knowledge on how to access them and when and how to use them.

  3. When more advanced aids are used, they are uncomfortable and can’t be easily personalised.

  • “Don’t think that robots will replace humans at the workplace anytime soon, ML still lacks inputs of real data”

    Wolfgang

  • “There are some tools to help resolve ergonomic challenges, but mostly they are extremely basic, as a forklift”

    Carmen

  • “We used Exoskeletons once for the metro construction project, but only heard complains from the workers”

    Eduard

Results of Problem Diagnosis.

That’s when the first time magical word “Exo-aid” has been brought up and puzzle pieces started to fit together. To ensure safe work environment, while accelerating the automation adoption we need to put main players together: EHS managers and Insurance companies, and of course, not forgetting about our secondary personas - exo-skeleton providers, workers and robotic and machine learning professionals.

Now, as we had identified gaps and opportunities of our personas, we started to cross check and map needs of each customer (using Value Proposition and Business Model canvaces), that allowed us to create the first iteration of the workflow of the whole solution.

Validating hypothesis.

Being short-term and low budget investigation, we had to get creative with validation of our solution with wider audience. In order to learn if people are looking for innovative solutions to reduce work injuries, and if SmartExo will be a good fit for them, we created a mock web-site and ran the series of Linkedin campaigns targeted to EHS professionals. Our goal was measure the ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) engagement with the campaigns, as well as see which features are the most desirable one to ensure the right priorities for MVP and further roadmap.

In conclusion.

The goal of this project was not not to deliver sophisticated design system, and not even the final product, but the series of insights to explore business opportunities and capture the value. This said, working on this fast pace investigation, I reaffirmed how important the method of Design Thinking is, as rapid prototyping, immediate iterations and frequent pivoting - are the base for the project like this.