Sayya Dushanbieva
📍
San Francisco, CA
Currently seeking creative spaces where curiosity drives the work, with care for craft, inclusion, and designing products that matter.
Vitara
Biosensing infrastructure for proactive, personalized thyroid management between doctor visits.
Timeline
4 weeks
Spring 2025
Role
Lead Design
Research -> hi-fi
Mentor
H. Dubberly
Advisory
Scale
Concept pre-launch
0->1 concept design
Diagnosed in minutes.
Treated for life.
Re-checked twice a year.
OVERVIEW
Vitara is a wearable and app for people living with hypothyroidism.
Two sensors. One picture. An adhesive patch reads iodine levels in sweat; a ring tracks temperature, heart rate, and sleep. Together, they build a digital twin of the user's thyroid behavior, surfacing trends, predicting flares, and guiding the next action between every lab draw. Not twice a year, but continuously.
PROBLEM
Hypothyroidism is slow, systemic, and easy to under-treat, yet the standard of care is a single TSH reading every six months.
Hypothyroidism develops when the thyroid gland under-produces T3 and T4—the hormones that regulate metabolism. Two causes dominate: iodine deficiency and autoimmune attack.
The condition reshapes metabolism, mood, sleep, weight, and temperature. Each shift is subtle day-to-day; together they remake how a person feels. A worsening trend can build for weeks with nothing to confirm it.
How might we give patients continuous visibility into their thyroid health, so they can connect daily habits to physiological shifts and act before the next appointment?
PROCESS
Research ran in two parallel tracks. A systems analysis mapped the biological feedback loop, where the body's regulation breaks down and why. Patients interviews asked about their daily life managing hypothyroidism.
The audit produced a map of disconnect. The interviews produced a list of moments: the unexplained weight gain in December, feeling tired and sleepy during the day. No existing product was designed to catch in time.
Feedback loop of dysfunctional thyroid
The drift starts long before the diagnosis.
Interviewees described a slow build: energy ebbing, sleep fragmenting, weight creeping that only became "a flare" in retrospect, after labs confirmed what their body has been signaling for weeks, if not months.
Build for early signal, not the late confirmation.
Data alone doesn't reassure, interpretation does.
Patients shown raw biomarkers reported feeling more anxious, not less, The relief came only when the numbers were paired with a plain-language read of what they meant and what to do next.
Translate every metric into a next step.
SOLUTION
Vitara is a wearable system and mobile app that gives people with hypothyroidism continuous visibility into their thyroid health between lab visits.
Two sensors feed a shared data model: an iodine sweat patch detects concentration shifts that precede flares; a smart ring tracks sleep, temperature, and heart rate. Together, they build a picture of the user's health.
Feedback loop with Vitara
Iodine sweat patch
Tracks iodine levels to prevent triggers.
Smart ring
Monitors health to detect early signs.
Reveals patterns and predicts flares.
Mobile app
Body health & trends
Hypothyroid flares accumulate. Body Health surfaces iodine, sleep, body temperature, and heart rate as a single moving picture, so patients can see the pattern forming before it becomes a symptom they can't explain to their doctor.
Vitara recommendations
When a pattern shifts, Vitara responds. The assistant surfaces specific guidance tied to your data and explains the reasoning behind it in plain language.
Iodine sweat testing
A weekly test feeds fresh iodine data into the system. Review past results, start a session, and get targeted guidance on what to adjust before the next one.
REFLECTION
User research before interface design
A short design sprint meant building an experience around assumed behavior rather than observed rich lived experiences. I would have tested more, specially how a weekly sweat test would fit into a real routine and whether the digital twin is legible to someone who hasn't looked at their thyroid data before.
Closing the loop with clinicians
Vitara currently surfaces insights to the patient. The natural next step layer is the clinical side, giving doctors a summarized view of continuous data before appointments, so the six-month lab work becomes a richer conversation rather than a single number.
©2026 Sayya Dushanbieva. All rights reserved.