Week #7
Incorporation, new design, 700+ data points, and more asparagi stuff 🥬
Welcome to our weekly update on Dromadis Health! 👋
As usual, comments and feedback are suuuuper welcome. Email us, comment on this post, or just reach out for a chat, we’re friendly people! 😁
Quick refresher
We’re building Asparagus, the first device that tracks your diet, effortlessly. It works by analyzing your urine, directly from your toilet bowl. 🚽
This week, in short
We incorporated, used your feedback to update the design of Asparagus, started physical 3D prototyping, and collected 700+ data points from our customers! 📊
Week #7 accomplishments
🎉 We’re an official company
The last 8 weeks have been a crazy ride. And we’re still accelerating! Incorporating became a necessity for us to handle our finances properly and apply for more grants.
It’s official, we’re now co-founders and our baby’s name is Dromadis Health Ltd. 👶
👨🏽🎨 We heard your feedback about the design
Last week, you sent us plenty of feedback about the design. We heard you!
To address the concern around positioning, we made the collection device moveable both around the toilet bowl and in depth. And you can do adjust it without putting your hands in the toilet bowl. 🖐️
Some of you asked about splash back: the surface material and shape will be optimised to minimise it.
Just position the device wherever feels most comfortable for you, and pee away!
🖨️ Heard of 3D printers?
There is no better way to test whether people feel comfortable using the device other than... actually trying it out.
That’s why this week we went to the Advanced Hackspace’s 3D printing lab to get our first physical prototype. So surreal! We’ll be trying it out this week, and will let you know how we felt next week.
👩🏼🔬 We worked on the biosensors
We also made more progress on Asparagus’ biosensors. Rosalia dove deeper in the tech this week to start designing our first biosensor circuits.
🧪 700+ data points for first ad experiment
As promised, we started running experiments! The goal of the first one was to answer the following question:
Given information about the impact of imbalanced diets on their health, are people interested in tracking their diet?
We replaced people and diet by more specific information and ran 6 experiments, collecting votes from over 700 individuals. It cost us £15.
peoplewas replaced by healthy foodies, overweight individuals, and moderate quantified-selfers.dietwas replaced by salt intake and sugar intake, which are likely to be the first two sensors we develop.
Results: Healthy foodies were the most interested (>50% would like the data). Salt intake was clearly more interesting to people than sugar intake.
🌐 New website
To run our next series of experiments, we quickly put together a website about Asparagus. 🔧
We will use it as a testing ground to to measure how much people want to buy the product!
Why does tracking your diet matter?
20% of worldwide deaths can be attributed to an imbalanced diet (excess sugar, salt, processed foods, etc.). – Science Daily
That’s 1 in 5 people.
You can only control what you measure, they say. But the current solutions to track your diet just don’t make it.
86% of adults (US) do not track their diet. 70% of them never did. – Statista
We believe the problem lies in the high level of effort involved in using a food tracker app. It is an active process with no short-term reward. A good solution needs to be passive.
Let’s get an Asparagus in everyone’s toilet so we can all be more conscious of the food we eat, and receive personalised advice to live longer. 💪
What’s next?
🖨️ 3D print a prototype
🧪 Run experiments with the new website
🤝 Find distribution partners
Thanks for reading our update, please leave a comment or question below. Feel free to share this newsletter with whoever you think will find it interesting!
See you next week 👋
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