SOMNU CASE STUDY

Making Sleep Testing Simple and Accessible at Home

The image shows a sleep aid device and a smartphone with the Somnu logo, placed on a wooden surface against a plain white background, with text indicating it is the first step to better sleep.

Overview

Somnu is a graduate-level service design project I developed at ArtCenter College of Design, during my Grad program, focused on reimagining the at-home sleep study process used to diagnose Sleep Apnea. The solution integrated hardware, a mobile app, and a doctor-facing platform to make sleep testing easier for patients, more actionable for physicians, and more efficient for healthcare providers.

By approaching this as a service design challenge, I mapped the full journey across patients, doctors, logistics, and business systems. The result was a holistic ecosystem that reduced setup anxiety, improved data quality, and aligned with a viable business model.

Goals

  • Patient: Reduce setup anxiety and improve compliance by simplifying onboarding.

  • Doctor: Deliver structured insights instead of raw data to save review time and improve diagnostic confidence.

  • Business: Create a service model with lower re-test rates and a sustainable revenue stream.

Role

Lead Service Designer (Graduate Project, ArtCenter)

Responsibilities

Conducted secondary research into sleep testing workflows and adoption challenges.

Mapped end-to-end service blueprint across patients, doctors, logistics, and insurers.

Designed the patient mobile app for onboarding and guided setup.

Prototyped the doctor dashboard with annotation and reporting features.

Created journey maps, moodboards, and service flows to unify the ecosystem.

Collaborators

Independent project within my ArtCenter graduate program, with critique and guidance from faculty and peers.

The Challenge

How can we improve the sleep quality of Americans?

According to National Sleep Foundation leading medical cause of poor sleep is sleep apnea, a sleeping disorder in which sleeping repeatedly starts and stops.

Untreated Obstructive sleep apnea is causing American’s about $150 Billion a year. Sleep disorders are widely under-diagnosed due to friction in traditional sleep testing:

  • Expensive overnight clinic visits

  • Complex device setup at home

  • Fragmented communication between patients, doctors, and insurers

Pie chart showing the costs of apnea, with 58% due to lost productivity, 20% due to comorbidities, 18% due to car accidents, 4% due to work accidents, and the total cost amounting to $150 billion USD.

Current Sleep Study Set up in clinics.

Four individuals lying in hospital beds, each connected to medical devices through tubes and wires. The first person appears to be a man with multiple monitors, labeled 'Complicated.' The second person is a woman in a black shirt with a chest monitor, labeled 'Inaccurate.' The third is a woman with colorful wires and a sensor on her chest, labeled 'Not comfortable.' The fourth is a woman and an older woman, both resting with medical devices and wires, labeled 'Intrusive.'

Speaking with Patients

[Problem Statement]

How can we get the current population get tested for apnea so that they can start getting a better night’s sleep? 

Key Insights

We approached this as a service design problem, mapping pain points across patients, doctors, and providers.

Key insights:

  1. Patients struggled with setup and compliance → leading to inaccurate data or test abandonment.

  2. Doctors needed trustworthy, structured data → but often spent hours piecing together raw outputs.

  3. Healthcare providers sought lower re-test rates → since repeated tests increased costs and delayed treatment.

Service Design Approach and Solution

We approached Somnu as a service ecosystem, not just a device or an app. The goal was to simplify the complex and fragmented process of sleep testing into a seamless, patient-centered journey while ensuring doctors received accurate, actionable data.

The designed flow captured key service touchpoints across stakeholders:

  1. Prescription & Delivery of At-Home Kit.

    • Doctors prescribe the at-home kit, shipped directly to patients with easy-to-assemble parts.

    • This eliminated hospital scheduling bottlenecks and improved patient accessibility.

  2. At-Home Setup & Recording

    • Patients simply plug in the device, sync with WiFi, and record their sleep at home.

    • Guided onboarding reduced friction and increased compliance.

  3. Notifications & Data Transfer

    • Patients receive confirmation when their data is securely uploaded.

    • AI determines if further nights of testing are needed, reducing unnecessary steps.

  4. Return Logistics

    • Kits include prepaid return labels, streamlining the process for patients and minimizing delays.

  5. Doctor Data Access

    • Doctors access synchronized IR, thermal, and audio data directly via the Somnu server.

    • This ensures fast turnaround without manual handoffs.

  6. Analysis & Reporting

    • Proprietary Somnu software supports doctors in reviewing data, adding notes, and flagging irregularities.

    • This workflow improved accuracy and gave doctors better confidence in diagnosis.

By designing the system around both patient experience and doctor workflows, Somnu reduced costs, increased compliance, and provided a more reliable dataset for diagnosis. This service blueprint became the foundation for designing both the product and digital touchpoints.

Concept

A step-by-step infographic demonstrating how a home health monitoring kit is delivered from doctor to patient and back. It includes images of the at-home testing kit, a device for recording data, a patient sleeping, a person receiving a notification on their phone, the kit being shipped back, a doctor receiving data at a computer, and a doctor analyzing the data on a screen.

Designing the onboarding experience

Flowchart titled 'Digital User Flow' showing steps for a medical study app, including opening app, profile setup, camera setup, scanning QR code, starting study, progressing through study, and completing patient profile.
Flowchart illustrating the setup and operation of the SOMNU sleep tracking app with a camera and sleep study report, including steps for camera setup, scanning QR codes, adjusting camera angles, starting sleep tracking, and viewing results on a smartphone.
Try onboarding experience
Collage of bedroom and home automation visuals including rumpled bedsheets, neatly made bed with pillows, smartphone screens displaying climate control apps, abstract graphic designs, color swatches, icon sets, and wireframe sketches.
A series of sketches showing the screens of a sleep tracking app, including onboarding, camera setup, QR code scanning, adjusting camera angle, connecting to device, starting a sleep study, progress timer, sleep data, and completion screens.

Leveraging Technology

A spherical robot with multiple cameras and sensors on a tripod, with icons and text indicating features: thermal imaging, infrared imaging, directional microphone, and computer vision machine learning.

Business System

Diagram showing a home sleep test system by Somnu, including healthcare providers, suppliers, patient, doctor, and data storage, with arrows indicating data flow and proprietary software, alongside a description of the company's service and software advantages.

Reflections

Somnu was a pivotal project in my ArtCenter journey because it showed me how service design extends beyond screens. By looking at the entire ecosystem — from patients and doctors to insurers and logistics — I learned how to design for trust, and business sustainability in healthcare.

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