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Innovation Design Engineering (MA/MSc)

Huilin Li

Huilin Li completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of the Arts London in 2018. Her works are designed with stories and emotions to interact and communicate with the environment, in turn producing new stories and emotions. She has studied and exhibited both in the UK and China. Huilin works across a range of methods, materials and technologies, and her practice explores a personal preoccupation with interaction.  

Exhibitions

Work-In-Progress Show, Royal College of Art, London. 2019 

Work-In-Progress Show, Imperial College London. 2019 

Grand Challenge, Royal College of Art, London. 2019 

Matter of Stuff Gallery, King’s Cross, London. 2018 

New Designers Show 2018, Business Design Centre, London. 2018  

Camberwell Summer Show, Camberwell College of Art, London. 2018  

The Expanded Designer, Camberwell College of Art, London. 2017  

Contact

Website

Instagram Profile

Linkedln

Degree Details

School of Design

Innovation Design Engineering (MA/MSc)

As a designer, I believe that design language is powerful. Guided by this belief, the driving force for the majority of my works is the motivation to change people’s lives through design. In 2020, I started working on a future healthcare project and encourage people to take care of themselves in modern lifestyle. A designer always needs a sense of continuous development, constant questioning and an ability of combining knowledge from different fields. As an Innovation Design Engineering student, I intend to seek out opportunities for such developments and questions, constantly striving to better myself in the future.

People share their bodies with trillions of microbes. They live on and inside the human body and they change and grow depending on diet and other daily activities. Microbes form, feed and protect people. Maintaining a good and balanced relationship with the microbiome is beneficial to human health. In recent years, microbiome science has developed rapidly and is likely to become a major contributor to our future understanding of health and healthcare systems. An example of such development is The Human Microbiome Project, which was launched to characterise the microbial communities found in the human body and to identify each microorganism’s role in our health and body functions. Several companies have been created to allow people to measure their own gut microbiomes. Although these achievements in gut microbiome should be celebrated, they mainly focus on measuring and testing the state of microbiome. It is imperative to look forward into the future and consider not just measuring microbiome, but also delivering services and products that utilise gut microbiome for healthier life.
artificial intelligencefibreFuture of Healthcaregut microbiomeHealthhealth appimage recognitionmicrobiome

Health App — MicroMe can detect and calculate the fibre intake daily, shows gut microbiome status visually according to the fibre intake. It provides several ways to increase the diversity of gut microbiome. Users have more choices and can make a personalised plan to keep a health gut.

App Interface

Wearable Device — The wearable device detects the daily food intake and collect the data. It then connects to app to provide more insights for user.

Wearable Device (Back View) — People can wear it on the front or anywhere they think it can detect the food.

Future Biome-Treat — The customised biome-treat created to encourage a more enjoyable experience for users. It is a new form of food to support human health in the future. The biome-treat created based on individual’s microbiome profile, and the shape of the treat is created differently according to different tastes. The system provides the weekly data of users in order to understand their taste preference, favourite fibre food and the overall microbiome status, then provides a personalised treat containing fibre and some living bacterias to improve the gut health for users.

This is an exploration of utilising the gut microbiome to promote the health condition of young adults, help them control their weight, and prevent and mediate obesity and diabetes.

MicroMe is an innovative and cutting-edge project that aspires to explore and utilise our understanding of the gut microbiome and its relationship with bodily functions. MicroMe builds on recent development and studies in the field of gut microbiome showing that microbes play an essential role in regulating people’s dietary patterns as well as exposures to chronic disease.

This project provides a new solution which uses fibre to stimulate the gut bacteria to produce short-chain fatty acids that synthesise insulin, which then regulate the blood sugar and the immune system. The project uses dietary fibre as a design tool to explore the possibilities of managing and controlling the gut microbiome in daily life. MicroMe attempts a technological breakthrough by utilising image recognition to identify and track fibre intake. Additionally, the project aims to raise awareness and educate society about microbiome science, making it more accessible to the general public.

MicroMe challenges the traditional concepts of nutrients and provides a new approach to curing diet-related chronic diseases. In order to create an enjoyable service system and practical solutions, experts and target users have been involved in the design process of this project. At this point, this project focuses on how to better control weight and prevent and alleviate obesity and diabetes. It has the potential to be developed further to prevent and medicate additional diseases in the future.

Technology

Fruit test

Fruit test

Website

Website

Coding

Coding

Image recognition is a part of computer vision and process to identify the object. It is not a new technology. However, the early application of image recognition is very simple, such as facial recognition. This project requires the system to give fibre contents after detection. The application of fibre food detection and fibre intake calculation does not exist on the market. Thus, it required more time to train data for deep machine learning, several models tested for this project.

The main contribution is that the idea makes technology become more integrated into people’s lives, and used for a practical purpose. Functions such as image upload and real-time detection are convenient for users, and it helps to improve their healthy consciousness.

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