Prototyping!

What are we trying to learn?

Since we can’t test out the actual function of scanning the dendrites yet, we were more focused on whether our prototype seems functional and easy to use. There are 3 main things we are looking for from our prototype tests:

1. Whether our product seems easy to use and functional?

2. Best dendrite placement and bottle shape

3. Does our solution seem feasible in the pharmaceutical industry

Some questions we asked include:

• What do you think is the function of the sticker on the bottle?

• Do you think there is a better placement for the dendrite sticker?

• Do you think there would be a better bottle shape to use with these dendrite stickers?

• How do you expect dendrites to be scanned?

• Are you surprised to learn it can be scanned by a phone?

• Do you think it will be easy to use?

• Do you think this will be able to prevent counterfeit medicines? Explain

• Do you think this is feasible to implement?

• Do you feel that you understand how dendrites work?

This information will be valuable to us in the future because it’ll help us determine what aspect of our prototype to fix/enhance. Hopefully, from our prototyping, we can determine if there is a better placement for the dendrite sticker, a better design for the stickers, and if there is a way to make using dendrites more user-friendly.

Who is giving us feedback?

People who will use the dendrites on a day-to-day basis for their jobs and people who are actively involved in pharmaceutical regulations; we want candidates who are directly using our product, and people who are part of implementing from the top down. Based on this we are testing our prototype with pharmacists, FDA contacts, and attorneys specializing in the healthcare industry.

We have been able to get in touch with different pharmacists; some who have worked in retail pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens, and some who have worked in hospital settings. Some of our testers have chosen to remain anonymous, but we have the job title and location of where they work. Our group has also reached out to contacts at the FDA with the help of one of our interviewees Susan Trujillo who is the healthcare attorney we spoke to. So far our contacts are all located in Arizona. However, we do not see this as an obstacle to our goal of implementing a new tracking system of dendrites in the pharmaceutical industry because pharmaceuticals are regulated at a federal level in accordance with the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA). Because of this, medicine tracking and counterfeit prevention methods are standardized across all states. Despite some of our contacts being at the management level, they still do not have the power to implement a new dendrite tracking system. Because it is regulated at the federal level, only legislators have the power to make changes. However, the people we tested our prototype with are still experts in the field who would come in contact with our proposed solution, meaning they are important to the process.

The contacts have the potential to grow exponentially as after talking to our current interviewees, we are catapulted into a list of contacts from their personal network. While it would be best to show our prototype to people working in pharmaceutical manufacturing, unfortunately, we were unable to get in contact with any. Even with our emails and reminder emails, we did not get any responses.

What prototype are we creating?

For our prototype, we will be creating something similar to a pill bottle and having a dendrite on it that is visible and in a spot, so if tampered with, it can be detected. This is a physical prototype. Our first draft is a simple diagram that mainly shows the placement of the dendrites on the bottles. We were then able to use old prescription bottles and place make-shift stickers on them. With these bottles, we were able to test multiple placements of the dendrite stickers. We placed the stickers on top of the bottle and where the bottle cap meets the bottle. Hopefully, in our next phase of prototype testing, we will be able to 3-D print medicine bottles. We’re doing this because, in addition to focusing on where to place the dendrite sticker, we want to determine if there’s a better bottle shape that we can make that would correspond well to our dendrite stickers. We will also be reaching out to professor Kozicki to get a functional dendrite and hopefully obtain the dendrite scanning technology.

Our end goal is to show our people our physical prototypes. So far, we have made a low-fidelity prototype and a medium-fidelity prototype. Our low-fidelity version was a simple diagram showing where we will be placing the dendrite stickers. Our medium-fidelity prototype was the old pill bottles we used and the fake stickers we placed on them. We are hoping to create a high fidelity prototype, by 3-D printing new medicine bottles and obtaining actual dendrites from Professor Kozicki.

Our first, low fidelity prototype was a simple diagram that was drawn on a tablet, so no materials were needed except the tablet and the drawing app. Our second prototype required a standard, old prescription bottle, some blank stickers, scissors, and markers. The stickers, scissors, and markers were used to make a dendrite sticker to place on the bottle. The materials required for our final prototype version will be a 3-D printed model of a pill bottle that will be made out of plastic, a clear/laminated sticker, and real dendrites printed by Professor Kozicki. The clear stickers will be used to place the dendrite on our printed pill bottles. Overall, our prototypes do not take a long time to build. The low and medium fidelity prototypes took about 30 minutes to an hour to complete. For the high fidelity prototype, we think the longest portion of the process will be waiting for the 3-D model to be printed. We imagine this will take a few hours, depending on the machine. The rest of the assembly process (putting a dendrite on the sticker and then on the bottle) will take less than an hour.

Our prototypes so far can be changed quickly. Since they were mainly focused on dendrite sticker placement, to make a new prototype we would simply make new stickers to be placed on different parts of the bottle. However, when we get to our high fidelity prototype, the iteration time will be longer due to the 3-D printing time needed for each bottle.

Who is responsible for creating and testing our prototype?

David created the low fidelity prototype design by drawing the diagrams based on our teams feedback and overall solution. Michelle and Tony worked on the medium fidelity prototypes by volunteering to bring in materials. Tony brought the plain stickers and Michelle brought in old prescription pill bottles. Everyone in the group has tested our prototype by reaching out to pharmacists and lawyers in the pharmaceutical industry. Interviewing these people constitutes the testing of our prototype. Our engineers Keith, Sal, and Shresth will look into working on the high fidelity prototype working with the 3-D printer in our engineering school.

Our whole team has the skills required to reach out to contacts to test our prototypes. For our prototypes so far everyone has had the skills to buy and assemble our parts. Move into the final prototype stage, our engineers have worked with CAD softwares and will learn how it fits with the 3-D printing machine on campus. The rest of us will work on getting a real dendrite and the app from Professor Kozicki.

Where will we conduct our testing?

As far as where we will conduct the tests, it will not be in one specific location because our prototype is mobile enough for us to bring to different locations. Since some contacts aren’t in the Phoenix metro, we will be conducting virtual tests with them. There is a survey that is sent to all virtual interviewees to gather their thoughts and concerns for our prototype. As we move into final testing with our high fidelity prototype, we aim to physically bring these prototypes to our testers. They will be able to choose the location.

We did not need any special spaces or technology to build our current prototypes. The only space or technology we will need for our final phase is the 3-D printers located in the engineering school. These machines will help us build bottles that will work in conjunction with our dendrite stickers. We will also need the dendrite scanning application that Kozicki and his team have been working on if possible. Since our goal is to test the functionality of the dendrites it is important to make scanning the dendrite part of our testing process.

We are not doing any virtual research as of now that requires any subscriptions.

How will we track feedback?

We will track our interviews by recording their responses with an online survey. All interviewees were asked to fill out the survey after a brief introduction to our projects. It was important that we didn’t go too much into detail about the product at first because there are some questions that are trying to gauge what they're anticipating our prototype to do. However, after those questions, we gave a further explanation as to what dendrites do. This means we are relying on our testers to record their own thoughts. Since we are asking our interviewees qualitative questions about the prototype, we decided a survey would be the best method of delivery. The survey allows us to ask them multiple-choice questions and open-ended questions. With the multiple-choice questions, the data will be sorted automatically and in a standardized manner which made it easy to analyze. With the open-ended questions, we had to read through to note key points the interviewee made. From there, our team was able to determine which ideas were most repeated by the testers. The survey was also the best method to test with our interviewees virtually. Some were located outside of phoenix, so the survey made it possible for us to record their thoughts on our prototype. A list of questions that were included in our survey is under the what are we trying to learn from our test section of our prototype plan. Sample pictures of our survey can be seen below:

What determines successful testing?

A successful test for us looks like one where they believe dendrites will be easy to use (answered yes), if they think it will be able to prevent counterfeit medicines (answered yes), and if they can provide potential options for sticker locations or bottle shapes. The first two questions are focused on that specific prototype’s success in a certain phase. The counterfeiting question is crucial because the protection against counterfeiting is what our group believes are dendrites' selling point. This is what differentiates them from other existing technologies such as barcodes, QR codes, and RFID tags. However, the last two questions build the foundation for success in our next iteration of the prototyping process; that is how we move on to our next testing.

Since we did not collect quantitative data we did not have measurable thresholds specific to our data. However, for our survey questions that were multiple-choice questions, we were able to look at the frequency for each answer and note which answer was picked the most. For questions that only have a yes or no option, we want at least 70% of responses to be yes; this applies to our key success criteria discussed earlier.

Based on our survey results we have 88% of respondents believed that the dendrite technology will be easy to use. Which does indicate that the overall idea of scanning dendrites will be easy for people to learn. However, only 63% of interviewees believed that it would increase protection against counterfeiting. While this is a majority, we want the percentage of yes responses to be higher Of the people who responded it would not help against counterfeit medicine, 67% stated the sticker placement is good but there could be a better bottle shape. They said a square shape. This is the direction we will be moving towards. Hopefully, by the end of the next round, we will get 70% of respondents to say yes to our two key questions. Overall, we believe this phase is a success. Although 70% did not say the dendrites seemed counterfeit-proof, we did find out the dendrites seem easy to use, and we were given a direction for our next phase of prototyping.

How will we move forward?

Since our medium-fidelity prototype can’t be scanned, we aren’t fully able to test the functionality of our prototype which is crucial. Because of this, our next step is to create a prototype than is scannable. The results of our testing showed that interviewees think the sticker placement is ok as it is, but it doesn’t work for the bottle's shape. Some even recommended that a rectangular shape would work better. Moving forward, we will be testing out different bottle shapes in conjunction with our scannable dendrite stickers. With the new prototype, we will be asking similar questions that we asked in our current survey. The two key questions are whether they think the dendrites will be easy to yes and whether they think it will protect against counterfeit medicines.

We can design our prototyping plans to be able to conduct multiple rounds by scheduling times with our interviewees ahead of time. Since our group’s prototype takes less than a day to make, the bottleneck in our prototyping process is getting user feedback. We can counteract this by setting interview times first and then scheduling our prototype making time around those. Overall, we believe it is feasible to iterate multiple times.

There have definitely been some stages to our learning process. At first, we thought that it would be easy to make our prototype because we are making stickers to place on bottles. However, we soon realized that our medium-fidelity prototype would not work for our situation. The ability to fully gauge a dendrite’s functionality is dependent on the scanning app that is not available to the public yet. We also cannot test the dendrite sticker’s durability if we can’t scan the dendrites. We were naive to think the prototype we had early on would be enough. Now that we have moved past the initial stage, we have reached a point where we know exactly how we want to conduct the rest of our testing. We believe the process will go much smoother and hopefully, we can get in as many rounds as possible. There’s definitely still room for improvement with our product.