Case Study
Weka: Smart Vax Refrigerators
CONTEXT
Refrigerators have come a long way since the one my aunt and uncle used in their garage to store sodas and popsicles in when I was a kid. These smart vaccine refrigerators that Weka installed at clinics in the Philippines were enabled with so many sensors and cloud connections that they couldn’t begin to know what to do with all that data. Temperature monitoring, mechanical failure responses, inventory management… All things that could be pieced together to really have a meaningful impact on how these clinics manage their vaccine inventory.
This project was designed to create an MVP for Weka specifically around the device view(s) and how we could enable clinics to easily consume the data and make more informed decisions around things like processing orders and responding to mechanical issues. There is a really amazing opportunity to remove a lot of frustration from a process that is already painful enough for people to deal with.
Better health for millions of people.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Design a digital companion app for connected vaccine refrigerators across the Philippines that helps manage inventory, reduce the amount of “quiet expirations,” and track recalls more efficiently.
Survey says: “Seeing what’s going on in the fridge from anywhere is priceless.”
While we had the benefit of going from manually opening refrigerators to anything that even hints at being able to leverage technology to improve their lives, we still feel like we had a lot of positive feedback around how we executed on the digital companion. Most of the iterations that took place resulted from feedback that was more specifically about technical thresholds and what things (and when) people should be alerted about. Although, one takeaway was that people wanted push notifications to their phones when things got to a point of needing intervention, so our “Awareness” score has plenty of room for improvement!