Spring is coming to an end and we're heading into summer. But are you ready for the heat? Our end-of-spring to-do list will make sure you're well-prepared to jump into summer and make the most out of the season while taking care of your well-being and health. 

1. Hydrate

Need we say more? The heat is slowly creeping upon us, and usually, we don't notice we're dehydrated until it's too late. Staying hydrated helps regulate your body temperature, prevents infections, keeps your organs functioning optimally and sends nutrients to your cells. Not to mention, it also gives you that radiant summer glow. So, get yourself a large water bottle and start getting your daily H2O in (ideally 64 oz. per day)!  

2. Identify your health and wellness goals and make an attainable plan

It's time to focus on you. What are your health and wellness goals? How are you going to achieve them? For example, if you have arthritis or a sleep disorder, what steps will you take to improve your symptoms? Set up reachable health and wellness goals to feel your best during the summer. 

3. Get the right light therapy device

You can achieve many of your health and wellness goals via red light therapy. By stimulating your body on the cellular level, you can heal yourself from the inside out. With your unique goals in mind, select a light therapy device to help you along your health and wellness journey. 

4. Get a good night's sleep

Sleep is essential. Sleep allows the body to repair itself and be ready for the following day. A lack of sleep aids in weight gain, decreased immunity, and heart disease. A light therapy device can help regulate the circadian rhythm and help reduce sleep disorders, including insomnia. 

5. Clear the clutter 

Have you done your spring cleaning? While spring cleaning does give your home a bit of a facelift, it also comes with health benefits. A clean home strengthens your immune system, reduces stress and depression, and even helps motivate you. So get cleaning!

6. Spend time in nature

We tend to underestimate the power of mother earth; ye, spending time in nature is crucial for our health. Nature bathing is amazing in reducing stress, lowering blood pressure, reducing anxiety and stress hormones. Plus, the weather is nice now, and there's no reason you should be stuck inside the house. Go out and get some fresh, clean air in nature.

7. Go plant-forward

You may be interested in exploring the world of plant-based meals, and we don't blame you. As summer rolls around, you'll want to focus on eating light and fresh meals. Going plant-based is a great idea for the summer as it helps support your immune system and reduce inflammation. Not only that, but the bloat goes away too! And since it'll be summer, you won't want the bloat to hang around with you at the beach.

8. Make a home garden

If you have a backyard or some balcony space to grow vegetables, give it a try. There's nothing tastier than homegrown fruits and veggies. But aside from that, gardening reduces stress, gives you a vitamin D boost, builds self-esteem, and is a pretty good workout. 

9. Get vaccinated

Getting COVID-19 isn't a fun experience for most people. While some aren't severely affected, many people live with long-lasting effects. Protect yourself, your family, and friends by getting vaccinated. Once vaccinated, you can return to your normal life, which is something we all want to do. 

10. Find your inner zen

When your mind is healthy, you're healthy. This past year has been stressful, but you don't need to keep the stress inside. Let it out! Meditation helps reduce stress and increases focus, eliminating clutter in your mind. You can practice meditation while using your light therapy device to knock two birds with one stone. 

After reading this list, are you ready for summer? It's time you started crossing off items on our end-of-spring to-do list. Make sure to check out Kaiyan's MDA-certified and FDA-approved light therapy devices, choosing one that suits your needs. 

Whether you’re a dermatologist, physical therapist, fitness enthusiast or just someone considering integrating light therapy into their practice, you’ve likely heard about the multitude of benefits that these non-invasive yet powerful devices offer. As light therapy continues to gain popularity, more professionals are looking for light therapy devices to level up. 

Naturally, you can purchase professional devices from light therapy companies, but you can also develop a light therapy device that can be customized to fit your individual client’s needs. This is where we, Kaiyan Medical, come in to help guide you through the process of producing your very own private label light therapy products at our state-of-the-art manufacturing facility. 

If you’re interested in creating your own light therapy products, it’s crucial you understand the development process.

The Steps of Private Label Product Development

We want our clients to comprehend the creative and manufacturing process of developing private label light therapy devices. As this is your idea we’re bringing to life, you need to be included every step of the way. Here’s our step-by-step process:

Step 1: Feasibility Study

It’s easy to lose money by investing in a product without understanding user needs. If you don’t know your target audience, you’ll struggle to create a viable product. During the feasibility step, we determine the practicality of your project and examine its strengths and weaknesses. This helps to ensure the idea you want to bring to life is viable and effective in achieving its goal. 

Step 2: Industrial Design

With our advanced conceptual design team, we determine how we can best engage with your target audience. While we focus on design, we also make sure your device fits under the required safety and health regulations. Our in-house design process creates visually appealing, high-quality, and functional concepts for manufacturing and product planning. 

Step 3: Electrical Engineering

Our in-house team has vast experience in lasers, sourcing, prototyping, and LEDs to incorporate these components and masterfully develop your product. Our electrical engineers, who are in charge of this step, take your idea and bring it to life while ensuring high-quality performance. 

Step 4: Rapid Prototyping

Rapid prototyping is essential for our projects and allows the client to see and feel their idea in the palm of their hands. In addition, it also helps clients test products with their users and receive constructive feedback. Our rapid prototyping is completed in-house as we have the capacity to create a range of samples varying from simple to complex, multi-piece models. ‍

Step 5: Mass Production‍

After your idea is turned into a tangible product and has been tested, we then plan production with in-house, pre-pilot quantities. By doing so, we’re able to identify production areas that need to be fine-tuned while ensuring high-quality and performance standards. Once these steps are completed, your product will be ready for shipment. Through our vast experience and stellar team, we can ensure a smooth manufacturing process and will guide you each step along the way, from start to finish. ‍

So, Who do we Work with?‍

We’ve been creating MDA-certified and FDA-approved light therapy devices for years. That said, we’ve successfully worked with various brands in different industries, taking their ideas and bringing them to life. Here are some of the brands and products we’ve developed.‍

DemarkQ‍

DenmarkQ offers skin care devices that use red and blue light LED to target acne and scarring. The LED light uses the body's natural healing process to improve its overall wellbeing. ‍

Aduro Mask
Established in 2006, Aduro Skincare specializes in LED beauty-related products under a medical license. The product is internationally renowned and clinically proven as an effective, non-invasive therapeutic skin care treatment.

Perfect Countour

Perfect Contour is our line of permanent make-up machines. Our permanent make-up machines were designed for clinical use; however, we feel permanent make-up is more of an art form than a medical procedure through our experience.

Golden Eagles

Teeth whitening has been around for ages, and we've mastered the art of developing effective teeth whitening devices. We currently have over 20 different OEM models for professional whitening and devices for at-home whitening. 

Akstra

Akstra's brand focuses on hair regrowth and hair rejuvenation and offers products ranging from home-use to professional-use models. Since Asktra's first line of hair lasers was made for clinical environments, we opted for a sleek and clean design. 

Lumiceuticals

Lumiceuticals is a brand focusing on using LED technology for pain relief. We combined LED technology with neoprene material for practical treatment pads. The pads are secured by Velcro straps, making them easy-to-use for customers. 

If you’re considering developing private label light therapy devices, at Kaiyan Medical, we create MDA-certified and FDA-approved light therapy devices, ensuring you medical-grade, high-quality devices for your business. We are eager to work with like-minded partners in developing truly effective, safe, and valuable products that tap into the power of light therapy. 

We look forward to working with you!

It’s difficult to predict the success of a new product. Even the largest, most mature companies have created products that fail to gain market acceptance and profitability. And as we’ve seen in numerous industries, product success can’t be guaranteed by financial investment or process optimization.

With the need to move fast in the light therapy market and an inability to guarantee success through any means, we continue to seek ways to manage the inherent risk in product development.

There is a gap between user wants and user needs and while it is easy to assume that the difference might not be clear, taking an empathetic approach creates a finer line between the two. Although Creative Directors are problem-solvers at their core, they achieve this by building data-based frameworks for visualizing how best to serve their target audience.

It is no longer about market data assessment and sales hands-off alone; there is a need to properly distinguish between user needs and wants while choosing how best to attend to those needs and paying just enough attention to user wants. Understanding the user metrics for this analysis and insight might seem daunting, especially when the aim is to improve product experience directly, but taking a design-thinking approach helps make better sense of the process.

What Exactly is Design Thinking?

Popularized by IDEO, Design Thinking is a human-centered, empathy-first approach to creativity and innovation. Its underlying principle focuses on user needs, aspirations, wishes, concerns, and frustrations in attempting to solve their problems. Interestingly, Design Thinking focuses on the most important view from which problem-solving should be approached; the users. When problem-solving is approached from a user’s point of view, it allows for uncovering novel insights into the product’s user flow, thereby finding the right solution to the right problem.

The Design Thinking process is quite similar to the Agile methodology of Product Management; as a matter of fact, Design Thinking helps to materialize the otherwise abstract concept by allowing ease of iteration and faster user-testing processes. Implementing design thinking in product management makes it easy to consider expedient user experience factors. Top on the list includes:

1. ‘Predicting’ your users’ thoughts: Steve Krug, author of Don’t make me think, suggests fully understanding users’ needs and subsequent workflow, so much so that you can correctly predict their next move (no, you don’t have to be a mind reader to achieve this). This is a basic fundamental that connects directly between design thinking and product management.
2. “We should listen to our users’ needs to the point that we know and tell them what they should be thinking.” –Steve Krug.
3. Make your users think less: Hick’s law is the 4th law of User Experience; it suggests that your design should minimize how much your users have to think when interacting with your product.

Kaiyan Design Thinking Steps

Companies employing design thinking are allowed to release products more often, gather meaningful customer feedback, and validate a product’s use and vision in a marketplace while sustaining a high level of customer satisfaction, as one release builds on another to add features customers desire most.

Implementing design thinking into product development can be broken down into 5 steps:

1. Define — Customer Vision. You need to begin the development process by clearly defining the target customer’s underlying needs, developing a deep understanding of how a prospective solution improves their condition — a key principle of design thinking. Empathize with your users. Find their jobs to be done. Next, you need to define a prospective solution’s functional requirements and the core competencies required to support the solution for those jobs to be done.
2. Share — User Personas. Having defined the customer’s needs and the solution’s functional requirements, the next step is to host a meeting with all team members to share a common vision of the project. User personas should be defined and explained to the whole team. Your objective is to establish roles for each team member, with everyone understanding how they support the project and how each individual contributes to the project’s success. You want to avoid having team members merely given tasks without the context of how their tasks fit into the larger development. This approach allows team members to consider the entire project as they perform assigned tasks throughout the development, reducing the likelihood of misaligned pieces when the project is assembled as a whole.
3. Prioritize — Planning. The third step in this process is to meet with the project’s management team to categorize features slated for particular releases. The Kano model may be helpful to organize features in categories such as “Basic,” “Performance,” and “Wow.” The idea is to balance each release with features from each category, being mindful not to fill a release with features from only one category, such as having a Basic features release, or a release with only Wow features that doesn’t include a set of basic features required to make a product viable. The outcome of this step is a plan to introduce features to the marketplace through frequent releases with incremental customer value — another key design thinking principle.
4. Implement. The fourth step is where product releases are developed. It’s important to remain mindful that design thinking is an iterative process requiring feedback and validation. As such, each implementation needs to enlighten: include mechanisms and processes that will let you examine customer experience after each release. Apply web analytics or specialized tools that provide extensive commentary to analyze customers and gather valuable feedback. It is important not only to collect data but to make it work: make sure that the results of any feedback are added to the backlog to improve your product constantly.
5. Validate. The fifth and last step in the process is to review feedback on a particular release, validate the vision, and begin the process all over again with step 1. This focuses each release to meet the specific needs of a target customer, creating a building block approach to product development that provides incremental value at low risk. Accept that users may not immediately accept your concept. Try to be objective, don’t see things in black and white, and restructure your vision to improve your product.

Most of the companies jump straight to point #4, which is a terrible mistake.

To make things clear, structure your tasks: build up a framework, define both focus points and sticking points of your research, and remember that most questions have two answers — the one that appeals to business and speaks to a customer.

Development Cycle — Solving a Crime

Think like a detective when starting a product development cycle, and ask these questions:

Who?

Who is going to use your product? What are their habits and preferences? It is essential to understand real user needs and how they are addressed without your product. Define the key problems and set your sights on them. What’s the context of use? What is their motivation behind using your product, and how can you inspire them to make the most out of it?

Where?

Think big. What is the place of your product in the ecosystem? Sometimes it may be just a part of greater service. Keep in mind the environment of use since it creates a general customer experience.

When?

Whether you like it or not, time is vital for your project. “Done” is better than “perfect.” That’s why it’s important to keep the scope of your project in mind, to limit it to essential things for a quick market release.

Why?

What is the real value of the product for your customer and your business? What issues does it address, and in what way? Why did you create it, and what’s its role in the company development?

These questions are essential for creating a general perception of the main problem you are solving for your client: it’s so easy to get side-tracked with a load of on-demand, seemingly effortless tasks. Besides, it’s impossible to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, so why carry an extra burden? When details are pushing you to the limit, take an imaginary step back and see the problem from a different angle. Visualize the role of a certain detail in the general canvas of your work. It does not mean you have to bury your project under piles of documentation. We all know that red tape is more about restricting rather than making things easy, and freedom is essential at the initial stages of any project. This is how innovation is born; under conditions of free thought, bright vision, and sheer inspiration.

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In his book The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon started what we now refer to as design thinking. Since then, numerous other works have been published detailing design thinking concepts and how it relates to all manner of different business models. One of the most famous icons to design thinking in the modern era is probably Apple, Inc. Let’s ask ourselves:

· Did you feel you needed an iPod before Apple created?

· Did you feel you needed an iPhone before Apple created it?

Apple’s genius during the early 2000s was not in creating new products that no one had ever heard of. There were dozens of cell phone manufacturers making quality cell phones before the iPhone landed. There were dozens of MP3 players on the market before the original iPod.

But, once Apple entered the arena, none of that mattered. Why? Because Apple understood the unarticulated needs (and in fact, you could even argue that Apple’s real genius was creating a need for a product by releasing that product!) of its customers. How were they able to do this?

How can we solve a problem for our customer in such a way that they don’t even know the problem exists until we show the solution?

The Five Phases of Design Thinking

Design thinking is a process of five distinct phases of execution. Those phases are:

· Empathize

· Define

· Ideate

· Prototype

· Test

Looking at that list, it seems to be a mix of skills from various disciplines. “Prototype” and “test” seem to be drawn from engineering and product development, whereas “empathize” and “ideate” come from a more psychological, social methodology.

Phase 1 — Empathize

Empathizing immediately sets design thinking apart from most of the other business models out there. True, most business models strive to understand their ideal client’s needs and wants, but few do it from a relational perspective. This is what Simon Sinek talks about in his book Start With Why: That people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. For Apple, that meant understanding the desire of their customers to be a part of something. They weren’t buying things because it was the best. They were buying it because of the reasons behind WHY Apple made it. When the corporate world was turning its back on customer relations and focused more on profits than on value, Apple communicated a different mission and mindset, which allowed their sales to skyrocket.

Phase 2 — Define (The Problem)

Another crucial part of design thinking. The problem. The majority of creators will fail at this part because they think about problems as nouns. Problems are verbs. If you see a little girl trying to get cookies from the shelf, people will start listing the problems as:

· She needs a cookie

· She needs an adult

· She needs a ladder

· Maybe she needs milk with those cookies

While the truth is, she needs to reach. Reaching is the problem, not the cookies. If you solve the reaching problem, you solve anything she will want to reach in the future. Once we understand others' unarticulated needs through authentically empathizing, it’s time to define the problem.

Phase 3 — Ideate

Ideation, the process of coming up with potential solutions to your customers’ unarticulated needs, can only occur after those needs have been identified through empathy and the problem defined. Do we solve the problem through a product, or a relationship, or a service? Is it through expanding our business model to include other forms of retail or consumer service? As an operations manager, the unarticulated needs that I wasn’t meeting for my fellow workers were found in the way I was focused on problems, not on them personally. I felt like, and if nothing was going wrong, there was nothing for me to do. What was going on underneath the surface, and what I was failing to do, was to spend time with them, to learn their processes to the point that I could spot potential problems before they actually became problems. Again, this human-centered approach must consider, above all else, the user's experience, whether customer, employee, or client.

Phase 4 — Prototype

Prototyping doesn’t necessarily have to involve models or scaled-down products. Prototyping also applies to non-physical solutions as well, in terms of how we construct frameworks to solve problems. Obviously, there are times when physical prototyping is important, but the overarching goal of prototyping is to apply solutions in a controlled environment to allow for testing, the fifth phase.

Phase 5 — Test

The final and simplest phase of design thinking. Since design thinking doesn’t flow like time in a strictly linear fashion between stages, there are times when prototyping leads back to ideation and when defining the problem actually requires more time spent empathizing to reassess the customer’s needs. Because of this frequently recursive nature, by the time we arrive at the design thinking process's final phase, sometimes testing merely confirms the last step in our solution. Other times, it can restart the entire process from the beginning. The importance of moving fluidly throughout all five phases.

Conclusion

Creativity is about doing, not thinking. Design thinking as well is about playing and acting. Those actions will swing between a process-oriented approach and a human-oriented approach depending on the project. At the end of it all, whether we are talking about coworkers or customers, the one thing they all have in common is that they are people looking for solutions to their problems. Solving the problem without addressing the people will only lead to frustration and failure. Providing a solutions-based approach to problems rather than a problems-based approach to problems will guarantee a greater chance of lasting implementation and effectiveness of whatever problem we’re solving.

Sources:

· https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking

· https://www.creativityatwork.com/design-thinking-strategy-for-innovation/

· https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources-collections/a-virtual-crash-course-in-design-thinking

· https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/5-stages-in-the-design-thinking-process

· https://hbr.org/2008/06/design-thinking

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