EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Did you know that a 2% reduction of water levels in your body leads to a 20% decrease in mental and physical performance? Dehydration affects people of all ages and genders and has a negative impact on livability resulting in numerous health consequences. At LITwater we recognize this problem and conducted a thorough customer validation process to identify the main pain points and develop an outstanding solution: the LITbottle. We strive to eliminate the dehydration problem and improve overall livability with our smart water bottle solution.

Goal

With our LITbottle we want to enable people to drink enough water throughout the day and thus improve their quality of life. In this respect, we strive to create awareness about our customer’s drinking habits, solve their problem of simply forgetting to drink throughout the day and simultaneously educate them about their individual optimal water intake. To achieve this, our LITbottle reminds the users to drink with regular visual inputs and features an LED touch display on the lid, which gives them information on how much they have already drunk and provides an interface for entering individual data. We want to achieve a high degree of individuality by optimizing our customers drinking behavior through our self-developed formula for calculating optimal water consumption. In addition, we strive to base our recommendations for the optimal water intake on individual factors in order to improve the quality of life of our customers as much as possible.

Methodology

In order to analyze the problem of dehydration and consumer’s demand for a solution, the first step of our validation process consisted of a problem/solution survey. The first part of this online survey aimed at finding out who is especially affected by dehydration, why people are suffering from dehydration and what symptoms they show. The second part of the questionnaire focused on finding out who is asking for a solution, which particular features consumers are asking for and what factors do have the biggest influence for the actual purchasing decision. Since 100 women and 43 men from all age groups completed the survey, we were able to obtain valuable data for further analysis. Next to our own intense research activities, we conducted 18 interviews. First and foremost, it was important for us to interview several technical experts in addition to the customer discovery interviews, to get an overview of what we could technically implement and where we still needed support. Subsequently, we conducted interviews with health experts such as dietologists and medical doctors who helped us with the elaboration of our optimal water intake formula and gave us valuable insights in narrowing down the target group.

Results

The results of our problem questionnaire showed that 75% of all survey participants do not drink enough water throughout the day and 88% of these people do suffer from dehydration symptoms such as headache, thirst, and low energy levels. An interesting outcome of the survey was that 36% who do not drink enough water, are actually not aware that their water intake is insufficient. This finding was the first pain point that we wanted to tackle with our solution and later on also the basis for the decision to include the calculation of people’s individual water requirements. Furthermore, we found out that 54% of people claim that the main reason of their insufficient water consumption is that they mainly forget to drink due to a busy and stressful life. Consequently, it was clear for us to tackle this second pain point by creating a solution that reminds people to drink throughout the day. According to our solution questionnaire, 45% of participants would prefer a reminding bottle, 16% only an app, and 27% both, a bottle and an app. Through additional customer interviews we found out that people and surprisingly especially young people are already overwhelmed by hundreds of text notifications a day and do not ask for an additional app for this service. Moreover, survey participants indicated that the most important features of the bottle should include visual inputs which remind them to drink and lightweight.  Through the interview with dietologists, we were able to create an optimal formula by including several long-term factors as age, weight, food consumption, activity level and climate, but also considering day-dependent factors like weather and sports activities, for which we have created own buttons on the display. The LITwater website serves as the contact point for our customers to buy the bottle in the online shop and to calculate their optimal level of water consumption with our unique water consumption calculator. Our all-in-one smart waterbottle does not require any other device or app, with the LED touch display on the lid showing and tracking your daily water consumption, while also reminding you to drink throughout the day with glowing lights.

Contact Person

• nicole.zielinski@gmx.at

Student Team

• Nicole Zielinski
  Marlene Lechner
  Lena Hartmann
  Teres Zeilerbauer