ELLIE VAN Leeuwen
On the 13th of November, I conducted a phone interview with Ellie Van Leeuwen the creator of successful electronic smart base ‘Droplet’. The reason I didn’t get to meet Ellie to interview her in person was due to her holding an understandably busy schedule, she was also out of office for 2 and a half weeks in October due to being very poorly. Luckily Ellie was generous enough to still give me the time of day and agreed on a phone interview during her birthday week. I think as a fellow Bournemouth university student, she sympathised.
The purpose of Ellie’s interview was to give me some insight into how modern technology is working to aid the cure to dementia, but life is never as simple as that. So, therefore, I had to break it down into multiple categories and that led to the interview with Ellie. I firstly wanted to find out what triggered her to create ‘Droplet’ in her final year of design engineering, which then led to the success of the product and then general access. She also discussed the impact ‘Droplet’ has had for the NHS, ‘Droplet’ is a simple design that is very customisable. You’re able to change the reminder voice recorded by family and friends or even record it in a different language, which simples so simple but no one has ever designed anything like it before. This is found to be extremely insightful because it led to the discussion of people living with dementia take longer to process things whether that be to answer or question or even to do something, so therefore if a reminder in the voice of Siri keeps going off, after a point it will just sound like background music because of the lack of change. Again, I was met with the highlighted point that it is the simple changes we make to aid people living with dementia that really makes a difference. Ellie Van Leeuwen's grandmother was the main inspiration for the creation as she suffered from severe dehydration that led to her being misdiagnosed with dementia.
Hearing Ellie’s story reminded me of Tommy’s story, as he was also misdiagnosed before told he had early onset dementia. He was told he was bipolar which his wife strongly contested and led to the discovery of dementia. Droplet’s success story is only the beginning, in the year 2019 we have much more to expect from Ellie and her team. One piece of advice she wanted to give final year students any design engineering or product engineering is “Focus less on children, parents and babies and more on the elderly because it’s an industry that gets left behind but benefits more”.