Element B

 Domestic abuse victims often face significant barriers when seeking help. Even if they have some mobility,  71% of victims' report that abusers monitor their communication, restrict their movements, and/or manipulate them in a manner that prevents them from reaching out in an indiscreet manner. Current safety tools are either too visible, inflexible, or too dependent on established infrastructure or law enforcement, leaving victims without discreet, reliable, and comfortable ways to signal for help. 

Introduction

Element B includes mostly analysis and discovery of other solutions people have come up with to our problem. Our focus is to create a discreet panic button that contacts trusted individuals or authorities without letting anyone around you know. In this section we researched and analyzed patents and products with similar ideas to confirm that our project does not have any overlap and study if these patents have mechanisms with useful applications towards our design. We worked closely with licensed therapists, clinical psychologists, computer science engineers, and law enforcement officers who have worked in the domestic violence unit to analyze these solution attempts and incorporate them into our own design. Our collaboration led us to study multiple mechanisms that could prove beneficial to our design. This includes Apple's haptic feedback mechanism, a patent that measures key biometrics(heart rate, breathing, perspiration, etc.) that can be incorporated into a product in a discreet manner, as well as a personal alert device that contacts authorities or contacts immediately. 

Conclusion

From working closely with experts, analyzing products and patents as well as providing an engineering project proposal, we generated various key insights into what criteria we should include in our product design. Dr. Matta, a licensed clinical psychologist suggested to incorporate several levels of contact into our design as to ensure that individuals in high-risk situation are comfortable in using our product. Additionally, one product we were suggested to study is the Apple AirTag which provides preexisting infrastructure for location tracking services by itself. Consumers, too, helped us in the design of our discreet personal safety device; the vast majority of customers (72.5%) believed that haptic feedback (vibration) would be most useful for confirming that trusted contacts/authorities were contacted. Moving forward into Element C, we have assessed the weight of previous criteria and generated new criteria for our project, enabling us to make a well-informed decision when comparing our initial designs and new ones generated due to this element. We have proved the validity of several designs over others: the beaded bracelet, discreet ring, airtag case, and probation bracelet.