Drink Up: A Smart, Hydration-Focused Water Bottle

Abstract

The world is rapidly following a trend of becoming more health-conscious and fitness-focused. This new emphasis on health, combined with the rise of smart technology allowing personal device experiences to be tailored to each user, has created a growing market for smart health and fitness technology. Though this industry is prevalent and growing, the high prices for production and technology have made products expensive and thus inaccessible to lower classes. The global health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the necessity for broader access to products that may support one’s immune system and overall health. Thus, this thesis seeks to create the potential solution of an affordable smart water bottle that tracks one’s hydration throughout the day and encourages the user to drink more water based on the user’s personal biological factors. The importance of this objective is confirmed by market research and a consumer survey. The design solution for this objective is a smart water bottle and integrated web application. The bottle utilizes an ultrasonic sensor, powered by a Particle Argon controller and lithium polymer battery, to track how much water is consumed, then connects via Wi-Fi to automatically display hydration information to the user. The user then uses this hydration information to drink more water, which is again fed into the application, restarting this cycle. This thesis outlines the design of this product as well as the proposed product implementation and details the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the process. It specifically proposes a method for iterating multiple bottle and application prototypes using experimental testing and consumer surveys. This thesis concludes by proposing future work to complete and improve upon this project.