#160 2021 · Claire's Place Foundation (with Woojer) · Medical devices / patient adherencepair-two-problems
A medical device that kids hated got redesigned as a speaker that happened to also be medicine
the problem
A daily medical treatment that's physically necessary but unpleasant gets skipped whenever the patient can avoid it, and the standard fix (education, reminders, guilt) does nothing to change how the treatment actually feels
background
People with cystic fibrosis need daily airway-clearance therapy to loosen and clear the mucus buildup in their lungs that would otherwise cause serious infection — standard treatment uses a bulky vest that mechanically pounds the chest at high frequency until the mucus loosens. For children especially, the sensation is unpleasant enough that adherence is a chronic problem: a treatment whose entire medical value depends on being done daily, for life, competing against a child's very reasonable desire to avoid a routine that hurts and feels nothing like anything they'd choose.
Claire's Place Foundation, a cystic fibrosis nonprofit, partnered with sound-technology company Woojer on the observation that the airway-clearance vest's mechanical action — high-intensity vibration at roughly 40 Hz — is close to the deep bass frequency already present in a huge amount of popular music. Rather than treat the vest and the treatment as one thing and music as an unrelated distraction from it, they rebuilt the vest to deliver its clearing vibration as literal bass output from real songs.
the move
'Sick Beats' plays a curated catalog of therapeutic 40 Hz music through Spotify via eight transducers built into the vest, so the exact physical vibration medically required to clear the lungs is delivered as the bassline of a song the wearer chose, rather than as an undifferentiated mechanical pounding — the treatment dose and the music are the same physical event, not two things happening at once.
the payoff
Sick Beats won the Cannes Lions Pharma Grand Prix and multiple additional Cannes Lions Health awards in 2021, and a D&AD Pencil the same year, recognized specifically for reframing a dreaded compliance device into something patients wanted to use — converting the core adherence problem (avoidance of an unpleasant necessary routine) into a product built around active desire to use it.
what came after
Sick Beats is cited in medical-device and health-marketing literature as a model for solving a chronic treatment-adherence problem by redesigning the mechanism of the treatment itself around what the patient already wants, rather than layering motivational messaging, reminders, or gamification on top of an unchanged unpleasant device.
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references
- [1]GlobeNewswire — Claire's Place Foundation Partners with Woojer to Launch SICK BEATSGlobeNewswire, 2021globenewswire.com
- [2]Adage — Woojer brought relief to people with cystic fibrosis with its innovative music vestAdage, 2022adage.com