Designing of a smart system that monitors belongings and to avoid losing them while traveling via public transportation

Abstract

Forgetting is part of human nature, though it may sometimes be something undesirable or inconvenient. Additionally, beyond the inevitability of forgetting, in Costa Rica there are some factors that cause in people a lack of attention to their belongings while commuting, with the main reasons for it being the isolation caused by the Covid-19 global pandemic, the stress of all the daily responsibilities and the long rides the students and workers go through regularly, aggravated by the traffic congestion.

With the objective of helping people avoid undesirable situations where they must find a way to retrieve a lost item, buy a replacement, or just accept their loss; we created KipClose, an intelligent device’s system that notifies promptly and in an intuitive manner when the user is leaving something behind. That way we seek to eliminate the stress of losing your items and reduce the insecurity users may feel while commuting, preventing you from leaving stuff behind and thefts.

To approach this problem, we applied Design Thinking methodology, which is divided in several different steps that will be discussed throughout this article: empathize, define, ideate, and prototype. It should be noted that the most important aspects are the definition of the target user, the identification and simulation of the system´s functions and the development of a visual and morphological language for these devices. All of this analysis is proposed with the mission of standing out from similar products through innovative features such as the immediacy and customization.