The Great Pivot

In class, we constantly learned about how all start-ups go through major pivots. One story that really resonated with me was the one about Ekko Device. In the class, they started as a team of five guys who wanted to create an app that stored the clothes in a person's closet and selected outfit ideas.

This week, our group began to face the same dilemma. After the teams began to present their ideas in front of the class and the questions provoked careful consideration of approaches, our group reconvened and reorganized our explorations. From last week, we have moved away from agriculture and are now beginning to look more closely at the healthcare/ wearable technology industry. Eugene, voiced his idea of a motion sensor capability that would have a notification system for when an elderly person falls. This conversation allowed us to think about the health devices and wearable tech space in general. Knowing that Apple was swiftly moving into this arena, we felt comfortable investing time in this topic. We ran across two major problems with Eugene's idea. The first was the need for hardware that detects a person's fall. The alternative would be to develop a creative way for an iPhone's motion sensor capability to understand what a falling motion would be, whether it is in a person's pocket or someone holding it. The second issue is that the prevalence of smartphone/iPhone use by elderly people is low. This made the topic a lot less attractive as the amount of people who would utilize the tool is small.

Yet, the conversation led to us to start exploring what we can do with an app to allow people's relatives or emergency systems to be notified if they are physically hurt.

On the other hand, we also discussed a nutrition monitor mobile application. We knew that there were solutions like these out there but we wanted to see if there was a way to do it better. This was the topic that excited me the most. I have learned through other classes the rise of health consciousness across the country. The important part that we wanted to note though is that calorie counting requires a very specific type of person, we wanted to be able to translate it into something a lot more meaningful to an average individual.