Project Overview

Out of personal experience with food allergies/restrictions, Shireen Yates and Scott Sundvor founded Nima to develop a brand new way to quickly test food on-the-go for unwanted ingredients. Nima is a discreet and portable device that allows consumers to test their meals for gluten in a few minutes. Nima’s technology is the culmination of a whole new approach to sample testing. The chemistry employed incorporates new innovations on speed and sensitivity, and the hardware design allows the device to be smaller and more portable than anything on the market today. Nima also connects to an app that records test results and restaurant reviews through their smartphone for future reference and community sharing. Nima continues to develop different capsules for different food intolerances and allergies using the same technology, with tests for peanut and milk coming in 2017.

Organisation

Nima

Team

Shireen Yates, CEO/co-founder, Nima
Scott Sundvor, CPO/co-founder, Nima
Montaag industrial design firm

Project Brief

Roughly one-third of Americans avoid or reduce gluten in their diets, and people with food sensitivities are anxious about the potential negative repercussions that could follow dining out. When trace amounts of a food can cause a reaction for folks with food sensitivities, strict avoidance is the best measure to prevent serious consequences. Food testing kits currently on the market are clunky and difficult to use, take about 10 to 15 minutes and aren’t useful on-the-go. These limitations usually mean that most consumers don’t do their own testing.

Nima is a technologically-advanced device with a human interface that improves the lives of people with food intolerances and allergies by giving them the freedom to eat out with their family and friends without anxiety. As one of our beta testers said, “It’s pure happiness to be able to know exactly what you’re eating.”

Project Innovation/Need

Being able to test food quickly, easily and discreetly were important drivers of the design process. Together, the combined team created an electronic device and a disposable capsule that turn a complicated eight-step laboratory food testing process into an easy three-step process: 1.) insert a sample of food into a disposable capsule, 2.) insert capsule into Nima’s sensor, and 3.) press the button and wait two to three minutes for results. Nima reports if gluten is present—at levels of 20 parts per million (ppm) or more. The sensor displays the result in an intuitive way—a wheat symbol when gluten is present and a smile when the sample is less than 20 ppm.

Design Challenge

During the development phase, requirements around sample preparation needed consideration. The food sample needs preparing before mixing with the chemistry. In exploring different methods for preparing the sample in the capsule, we discovered that grinding could be built into the capsule’s cap in an extremely simple and cost-effective way. As the user screws the cap on the capsule, the food is ground and released into the liquid chemistry inside the capsule. Once the capsule is inserted and the power button is pressed, magnets inside the device mix the contents of the capsule. The process is as effortless as it is tidy—the user never has to grind, mix, shake or be exposed to the liquids in the capsule.

Also key to the device’s design were requirements for ultra-portability and a vertical-orientation during testing. The team ultimately decided upon a triangle form factor: one side is dedicated to the user interface, one side to insertion of the capsule and one for resting on a surface. Its iconic form factor is immediately recognizable and gives the product a forward-facing, proper “face” for the display of the results.

Sustainability

The design team worked on making the device low energy so we can use a smaller battery, since batteries are terrible for the environment. The device runs on about 20 tests (which take about two to three minutes each), and is recharge by micro-USB cable.