How light therapy was seen
- Stuck inside clinics and bulky equipment
- Perceived as low-impact and occasional
- Hard to fit into daily life
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Smart Bandage
Light-therapy applied research & product design
Light therapy treats acne, wounds, scars and joint pain, yet people still see it as slow, occasional and clinical. The brief was deliberately open: make it popular, affordable and free of its prejudice. So most of the effort went into the right question before any shape: mapping patents and technology, crossing it with what the institute could actually build, and shaping a device, an app and a package from there.
RoleProduct research, patent and technology analysis, industrial and UX/UI design, prototyping and packaging direction.
Business impact
Reframed light therapy from a clinical novelty into a flexible, app-guided consumer product.
Before & after
What changed
What we delivered
- A flexible, app-guided device for face, joints or wounds
- Two buildable prototypes, from full dressing to acne patch
- Retail packaging that turns therapy into an everyday product
From patents to a real device
The research swept the field: scientific papers and patents on smart bandages, printed flexible LED displays, stretchable batteries with wireless charging, waterproof optoelectronics, optical-fibre dressings and embedded photo-therapeutic circuitry. Each one answered what is already possible, what is protected, and where there is room to build.
Crossed with the institute’s own manufacturing capability, that map pointed to one direction: a single flexible device, managed from the phone, adaptable to many body areas and able to serve several treatments instead of one. Managing devices from a phone is now ordinary; the bandage simply had to feel that friendly.
Two prototypes, one logic
The direction materialised into two buildable prototypes. Prototype 1 is a full-size flexible dressing for skin wounds: an LED mesh on a flexible circuit, driven by a controller and an ultra-thin battery sized to the number of LEDs.
Prototype 2 is the compact, fully flexible answer for acne: under 0.4 cm thick, a red and a blue LED wired straight to a flexible battery, no controller, switched on simply by pulling the protective layer. Same logic, two scales: light, adaptable and easy to apply.
Designing the package
The last layer made the product real on a shelf. The “LIGHT POWER” packaging frames a single-use light-therapy bandage that turns on the moment the pack is opened, treating therapy as an everyday consumer good rather than a clinical appointment.
It also hints at where this could go: with many users and sessions over time, the device opens room for new value beyond the single sale.
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