Context
Care is a constant in the headlines, but the debate almost always circles the same two questions: where will new carers come from, and who will pay for new facilities. The people rarely heard are the family members already doing the work. In Germany, around 73% of people who need care are looked after at home — three-quarters of them by relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Depending on the condition, that care can run to twelve hours a day or more: managing illness, doctor's appointments, nutrition, the household, and often personal hygiene. It is exhausting, and over time it wears down the carer's own health.
OTIS is a smartphone and wearable app that helps family caregivers plan their day — and deliberately reserve time for themselves. It was my bachelor project in the Interactive Media Design programme at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, which I developed with a fellow student as a team of two, around a clear brief: support people in a demanding situation without pulling their attention away from the person they care for.
Discovery
The concept was preceded by several weeks of research into how care is organised in Germany — where the friction sits, and where we as designers could actually make a difference. One pattern kept surfacing: family caregivers were treated as a given, a part simply expected to fulfil its duties, and rarely the subject of the conversation. We wanted to put them at the front of it.
It mattered to us not to rely on articles and books alone, but to speak with people who live caregiving every day — both professional care support centres and family caregivers themselves.
"We're not sick, we're just relatives." — Family caregiver
We distilled the target-group research into two personas typical of a German care situation: spouses or life partners carry the bulk of the responsibility, with smaller contributions from children or grandchildren.
The Idea
OTIS set out to make caregiving plannable and to make collaboration — with family, friends, and professional services — easier. To get there, we combined care documentation, already widespread in practice, with David Allen's Getting Things Done method, so a caregiver can keep track of what needs doing and ask for help when they need it.
The documentation captures the small, crucial details that let someone else step in: which toothpaste the person prefers, how they can still help with shaving. That turned out to be especially valuable for professional services — in several interviews we heard how draining it is for informal caregivers to prepare the same information over and over for constantly changing staff.
The concept itself is deliberately simple: plan the day, enter and document care tasks, and share them straight from the app when help is needed — with time for the caregiver built into the plan rather than squeezed around it.
Design Process
Paper prototyping carried the early work. The heart of the app — the Agenda — began as sticky notes we shuffled back and forth to test, quickly, which metaphors held up. Promising ideas then moved into Adobe XD and InVision Studio.
Paper prototyping the OTIS Agenda with sticky notes
Once the foundation and a design language were settled, we mapped a full plan covering every function across the phone and its smartwatch companion. Having that plan in hand was the best defence against feature creep: with a clear picture of the goal, it is far easier to stay on it.
Overview of the OTIS app screens across phone and smartwatch
Outcome
The final prototype is a complete walkthrough of OTIS's core functions on both devices — in our case an iPhone and an Apple Watch — from planning the day through documenting and sharing care tasks. Watch the prototype walkthrough on Vimeo.
Animated prototype showing OTIS's interaction behaviour
As one of my first end-to-end design projects, OTIS set a pattern I have kept since: ground the concept in real conversations with the people affected, and let a clear plan hold the scope.