Therapy equipment care made effortless

To kick off the project, I led a vision workshop across 4 sessions and 2 timezones with 20+ cross-functional partners, to align the team around the broader equipment care problem space. The session generated ideas across multiple opportunity areas, which I synthesized into an ideal end-to-end user workflow — mapping how the experience would differ across markets depending on how equipment ordering and insurance worked in each region.

From there, I translated the workflow into a storyboard illustrating the ideal patient journey — a north star artifact that anchored prioritization conversations and helped brainstorm experiments to run. The first experiment was clear: design a system that made equipment replacement effortless enough to become habit.

The central design challenge was building trust with patients. Nudging them to replace equipment more frequently risked feeling commercially motivated, so every communication was framed around therapy value. For example: "It's time to change your cushion to help maintain cleanliness and your therapy experience." Establishing that relationship between cleaning, replacing, and reordering was essential before we could ask patients to act.

I explored several concepts before testing with our researcher across four key tasks: checking equipment status, finding cleaning information, updating a component after replacement, and configuring a reminder.

Four changes came directly from testing. The dotted wear indicator was replaced with a continuous countdown showing nights of use remaining — one participant summed up the problem: "I probably have to calculate the number of dots." The label was also clarified to only state the number of nights left, to prevent confusion.

Component images were added to the replacement update screen after patients struggled to identify parts by name. And components due for replacement were surfaced more prominently so patients knew immediately which ones they had replaced and should update.

One of the more nuanced challenges was a legal requirement to include a disclaimer on every main page citing the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as the source of default replacement schedules. Placing this prominently on every screen risked cluttering the experience and undermining the clean, trustworthy tone we had worked to establish.

I proposed an alternative: a dedicated about page surfaced via an information icon next to the Equipment Care label, where patients who wanted that context could find it without it interrupting the primary flow. Legal accepted the proposal, keeping the experience clean while remaining fully compliant.

I worked closely with the PM to define the experiment setup. The experiment was launched as an A/B test in the US, where there are clear timelines for replacement and equipment resupply is reimbursed through insurance. This shaped both the language and the logic of the feature. A direct-to-consumer version would require a different approach, but that remained out of scope for this experiment.

We targeted two distinct cohorts: new and existing users, recognising they would behave very differently. New users had no existing habits to displace, while existing users would need to discover and adopt a feature they hadn't seen before.

New users were more straightforward: we could assume their equipment was brand new at account creation and begin the countdown automatically. Existing users were more complex — with no reliable replacement history on file, we asked them to manually input their last replacement date, or confirm they had never replaced a component, before the countdown could begin.

For reminders, we offered a default schedule aligned with CMS guidelines alongside a customisable option. Giving patients the ability to replace less frequently if they chose was a deliberate decision to build trust. It reinforced that the feature was built around patient needs, not engineered to maximise resupply orders.

Existing user engagement remained the open challenge. Only 20% of the existing user cohort discovered the feature within the first 30 days. Rather than wait, we acted on this signal quickly — shipping a follow-up set of design changes to improve discoverability in January 2026, including badging the navigation tab and introducing a splash page on app open to surface the new feature to users who had missed it.

With a full US and Canada launch scheduled for October 2026, we made one further design change to address the existing user adoption problem at its root. The original flow gated the core value of the feature (the countdown indicators) behind a required input asking users when they last replaced their equipment. Many didn't have that information on hand, creating friction at the exact moment we needed to demonstrate value.

In the updated design, we removed the gate entirely. All equipment is now assumed to be new by default, with the option to add a last-replaced date for greater accuracy. The tradeoff is an initially less precise countdown — but our metrics showed that once users see the feature, they understand its value and engage with it. Establishing the long-term replacement habit matters more than perfect accuracy on day one.

Equipment Care was myAir's first step supporting patients throughout their entire therapy journey, beyond the initial 90-day compliance period. The long-term vision is simple: equipment care should barely have to happen at all.