Disha
The future of indoor navigation and wayfinding
Disha is a dissolvable wearable patch that provides real-time directional guidance inside large environments like hospitals. It is light, non-distracting and completely dissolvable, leaving no environmental footprint regardless of scale. The project was designed specifically for hospital navigation, where getting lost costs more than just time.
Impact
| Recognition | Featured at Dubai Design Week 2020 and Global Grad Show |
| Validation | Interest from multiple medical institutes and private investors |
| Concept value | Explores a screenless, behaviour-first navigation model |
Indoor navigation systems rely heavily on static signage or digital interfaces, both of which break down in high-density, high-stress environments like hospitals. These systems demand attention and interpretation when users are least equipped to process information.
User problem
- Patients in non-emergency situations struggled to find specific doctors, departments and rooms without stopping someone for help
- Existing signage was overcrowded, multilingual in theory but practically unreadable under stress
- Any added cognitive load during a hospital visit increases anxiety and reduces trust in the system
System or business problem
- Hospital staff spent disproportionate time redirecting patients who were lost
- No scalable, low-friction navigation solution existed that didn't require a screen or digital literacy
- Existing solutions added a new behaviour on top of an already stressful experience rather than removing friction from an existing one
The navigation problem in hospitals wasn't the absence of technology - it was that every existing solution asked users to do something new in a moment when they had the least capacity to learn.
The solution had to work for anyone, regardless of language, literacy or smartphone access, inside a high-stress environment where attention is already compromised - and it had to slot into existing hospital workflows without requiring staff to change how they operate.
I was part of the research and product design team across the full project - from on-ground field research in Mumbai hospitals through to the final product concept, prototyping and presentation at Dubai Design Week 2020 and the Global Grad Show. My contribution spanned all stages, from exploring interaction models to translating behavioural insights into a tangible system.
1.Navigation breaks under stress
Users navigating hospitals showed high reliance on people rather than systems, especially when under stress or time pressure. Existing solutions were not aligned with real user behaviour.
2.Confusion happens at decision points
Users were not lost throughout the journey, but specifically at intersections, unclear signage zones, and departmental transitions. This reframed navigation as a problem of guidance at critical moments.
3.The obvious solution was not necessarily the best
Apps were the expected answer, but they rely on attention, connectivity and device access - none of which are reliable in a hospital context.
Field research across public and private hospitals in Mumbai revealed that users struggled most at moments requiring quick decisions. Signage was inconsistent, crowded spaces reduced visibility, and most users defaulted to asking for help. The key finding wasn't that the signs were bad. It was that under stress, people stop reading and start asking. Any solution that required reading, tapping or following a sequence of steps would face the same problem.
Research led to three constraints that shaped everything downstream: the solution had to communicate direction without language, add zero learning curve and fit inside an existing behaviour rather than introducing a new one. These constraints ruled out apps, kiosks, digital signage and wearables that required pairing or setup. Brainstorming spanned all five senses as potential navigation channels - vibration, texture, light, sound and spatial indicators. After extensive prototyping, the final concept emerged by combining the most effective elements from multiple directions - directional light display, wrist placement for natural line of sight and a dissolvable material that eliminated the waste problem at scale.
Disha is made of three components working together: a dissolvable microprocessor, LED paint arranged in a directional grid and zinc air batteries. WiFi routers within the hospital structure transmit signals to the patch, which triangulates the wearer's position and lights up the relevant directional arrows in real time as they walk - updating automatically at corners and junctions. The use flow was designed entirely around existing hospital behaviour: the receptionist activates the patch, sets the destination frequency and applies it to the patient's wrist like a bandaid. After use, the patch is peeled off and disposed - it dissolves within 2 days, leaving no waste.
Wearable navigation interface
A thin, dissolvable patch worn on the skin acts as a personal navigation guide by displaying directional cues through embedded LEDs at decision points in real time.
Designed around reception, not around the patient
The entire activation happens at an already existing touchpoint during every hospital visit - reception. No new behaviour is introduced for either party.
Behaviour-first, technology-second
WiFi triangulation was chosen specifically because it leverages infrastructure that already exists in most hospitals, requiring no new hardware investment.
Sustainable lifecycle
The patch dissolves within 2 days of disposal after use. Scale doesn't create waste - a hospital deploying hundreds of patches daily leaves no material footprint.
- Featured at Dubai Design Week 2020 and the Global Grad Show, receiving direct interest from multiple medical institutes and private investors
- Recognised as the only non-digital solution in the wayfinding category at both showcases - a direct result of the decision to reject the obvious answer early in the process
- Demonstrated that designing against the obvious solution - an app - produced something more appropriate and more memorable than the expected answer would have
Disha pushed me toward a kind of constraint-led thinking that most digital product work doesn't demand. When you remove the screen as an option, you stop defaulting to the familiar and start asking more fundamental questions about how people actually behave under stress. If I were to take this further, the next design challenge isn't the patient experience - it's the operational layer: how hospitals manage patch inventory, how receptionists are trained and how the WiFi triangulation behaves in older hospital buildings. The product concept is strong. The deployment system is where the real design work remains.