Midterm Project: Cortisol Monitor

My prototype is a physical object that coincides with a screen-based object; an app. It’s a monitoring patch that is worn, made from numerous of painless microneedles with a small apparatus attached to the top that monitors the levels of Cortisol throughout the day and reports the data to an app that would be configured into showing a graph of your cortisol levels throughout the day.
This prototype is medical technology. It is an innovation that monitors a specific hormone (cortisol) to help people regulate their stress. To provide a little context on the point of me specifically monitoring Cortisol hormone levels; a steroid hormone produced by your adrenal glands (produce hormones) which control your blood pressure, reduce inflammation etc, I isolated Cortisol as the hormone that is used to respond to stress. And monitoring the levels of cortisol a person’s body produces or lacks to produce.
When thinking about who I most wanted to help as far as an audience goes I thought about the rise of suicide rates among middle-aged Americans. According to a New York Times article suicide has reached its peak, surging to the highest levels within the last 30 years. More specifically there has been recent evidence that shows that suicide rates have increased more among middle-aged women than middle-aged men. Middle-aged women suicide rate has increased by 63 percent within the last 30 years.