Liz Cuneo: Hi, I'm here at Pharmapack with Lucy Baldwin from Ensera Design. Lucy, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Lucy Baldwin: Thank you. So I'm Lucy, thanks for the intro, Elisabeth. I head up user research and design strategy at Ensera Design. We're a product design and development company, in partnership with Ensera, who are the manufacturing business.
Cuneo: Excellent. Thank you. So, today, you had a fabulous presentation about a partnership you did with AstraZeneca, and you said that you worked on aiding the transition for users from a disposable autoinjector to a reusable one. You talked a little bit about how secondary packaging would help that transition for patients.So, how did the research that you did help you guys do this? And what was the first step to get the project off the ground?
Baldwin: Great question. So I think the challenge that we had with this project was, as you pointed out, Elisabeth, the device itself was fixed, and we were asking people with only two months of treatment to change the protocol, go from this disposable device that was preloaded with medication to a reusable device where they had to manually load. And because that protocol and those devices were fixed, it was really around what are the opportunities in the secondary packaging to make that transition as seamless as possible and user friendly as possible?
So that was the, the basis on which we started, so to speak, and the things we did to enable that, which I'll just cover off in brief. We took the time to desk research to understand what are the capabilities of people with diabetes, and how might they impact the way they interact with products and services. So neuropathy, and osteoarthritis being two things that impact dexterity and grip strength, and then retinopathy, so sight loss, and the impacts that we've had. We recruited people with those conditions to do a packaging study, to understand their experiences.
We were very fortunate, our client was very open minded, Agatha at AstraZeneca, she'd also, in the past, worked at L'Oreal, and she was really keen on us bringing in inspiration from adjacent categories, so from the consumer health, space, so we learnt from that and we put that kind of packaging in front of these to see how they interacted with it to help us come up with solutions.
And at the same time, we also did a contextual study in people's homes. So we spoke to people and understood their lived experience of the condition, how they administered the medication at home and you had, you know, the crucial thing about this is it's real life, it's not a clinical sterile environment where these devices are made, it's a kitchen table. Someone might be preparing a meal at the same time as they're loading their insulin, and priming it ready to inject into their arm.
Someone might be dealing with five different medical conditions and therefore have a cupboard full of medication with a load of boxes that all look the same. And so again, a challenge for them, particularly if they've got sight loss. Fridges, we saw full drawers, stuffed full of insulin, at the bottom and not much space for everything else. So all of this helped us build empathy and understanding of the condition, but also defined opportunities for us to make innovative steps that would impact these users' experience and and make their lives easier.
Cuneo: That's great. Thank you, Lucy. Thank you for your time today.
