Cora is a wearable smart sleeve that provides muscle activation data, paired with a mobile application that connects athletes with their physical trainer, sports psychologist, and coach to create a seamless, at-home physical therapy experience.
Time Frame
10 Weeks
Team Members
Sara Williams
Sullivan Wilcox
Savannah Wilkinson
Satchel Hallmark
My Role
Design Research Lead
The Problem
Athletes need a personalized and comprehensive recovery plan that focuses on both the physical and mental components of an injury with an easier way to track their progress.
Our Solution
A wearable smart sleeve that provides muscle activation data, paired with a mobile application that connects athletes with their physical trainer, sports psychologist, and coach to create a seamless at-home physical therapy experience.
Our Factors
For this project we learned about the ten psychological human needs, with this in mind we designed based on physical thriving and competence. Our team chose this pair based on the problem space within athletes recovery from an injury. These human factors will later help us with the goal in addressing physical and mental challenges for athletes.
Secondary Research Insights
To start off the research for this project, our group conducted secondary research to understand the existing problems for users.
Primary Research: Survey
The next form of research we conducted was an online survey. We sent out a survey to athletes in our target demographic to gain more insight. We were able to get over 100 participants.
Primary Research: Interviews
After Completing our online survey we conducted interviews with seven athletes, two experts and one group interview with four athlete participants. These interviews gave us great first hand insights.
Sprint Week
After collecting all the primary research our team decided to conduct a five day sprint week. This helped us get a head start on possible design solutions that could address our problem space.
Sprint Week Takeaways
Shifting focus to the physical side of recovery versus mental
Focus purely on mobility injuries versus concussions
How important the athlete, PT, and coach relationship is to physical recovery
Affinitization
With all the research finalized after our sprint week we started the affinitization process. We organized our data into groups based on their respective relationships.
Affinitizing Insights
Idea Pool
After affinitizing and sketching out ideas we created an idea pool. This was used to understand the impact and feasibility of our potential ideas.
Final Ideas Selected
User Personas
We created the user persona Nathan to help us understand our primary user while designing. This shows us our users pain points in their current journey.
