Personally speaking, it was an exciting day at Popular Front when a major medical device manufacturer engaged us to concept and develop a series of iPhone app prototypes. Our client’s expectations were both simple and challenging at the same time. We were to come up with a prototype that demonstrated the device’s potential to internal stakeholders while keeping in mind that the prototype would need to provide a meaningful service to end users/patients.

After a facilitated brainstorming session with the client’s team, an interesting concept/challenge was arrived at: We were to develop a prototype intended to test if the iPhone’s vector magnetometer was of sufficient quality as to serve as a scalar magnetometer and was thus capable of informing patients with implanted medical devices when they were venturing near potentially dangerous electromagnetic fields.

Knowing that there was a chance that the prototype would prove unsuccessful, due to device engineering constraints, the client’s fallback objective was to walk away from the project with a conversation starter of what could be- either with a future iteration of the iPhone or via a custom-built device. As such, the first phase of the prototyping focused on arriving upon several meaningful metaphors for the end-user UI. This was done via a rapid sketching process, which I led.

Once four candidate UI metaphors were identified, they were they produced as individual iPhone UI views that were then wired into the functional prototype the was developed by Popular Front’s engineers to sample & filter the iPhone’s raw magnetometer readings via the Core Location methods. Once assembled, the EMI Display prototype was tested under laboratory conditions where the original concern unfortunately proved true- the iPhone’s vector magnetometer could not be utilized as a reliable substitute for a scalar magnetometer.

Bummer.