Patient-centered design, acoustic AI and clinical collaboration are helping bridge the gap between noticing urinary changes and having meaningful information to act on them.
SAN Francisco, Calif. — October 3, 2026 — Soundable Health, a digital healthcare company developing acoustic AI technologies that turn everyday body sounds into meaningful health information, today announced that its urinary health platform, proudP, has earned back-to-back recognition across major global design competitions for its patient-centered approach to urinary health.
In the latest awards cycle, the proudP team received two honors at the Rome Design Awards: a Gold Award in Product Design – Smart Technologies and a Silver Award in Product Design – Medical Devices & Technology. Product Designer Eunjin Hong was recognized for leading the award-winning product design.
The recognition follows an honor at the Graphic Design USA (GDUSA) INHOUSE Design Awards and proudP being named a nominee at the UX Design Awards.
But the challenge behind proudP extends well beyond designing a better digital interface.
Closing the gap between symptoms and meaningful
information
Millions of men live with urinary symptoms such as a weaker stream, frequent urination, urgency, or waking repeatedly at night. Yet between first noticing that “something feels different” and receiving specialized evaluation or treatment lies a large, often underserved middle ground.
Many people have limited awareness of what their symptoms mean or how their urinary function is changing. Objective information can be difficult to obtain outside a clinical setting, while access to urologic care varies widely. Patients may arrive at a medical visit with months or years of symptoms but little information beyond what they can recall and describe.
For Soundable Health, this gap is about more than improving access to a medical measurement. Urinary health can affect sleep, mobility, confidence, independence, social life, and dignity.
proudP was created to help bring meaningful urinary health information earlier into that journey, giving people a way to better understand changes in their urinary function and have more informed conversations with healthcare professionals.
Rather than requiring specialized equipment for every measurement, proudP uses Soundable Health’s acoustic AI technology to estimate urinary flow from sound captured by a smartphone. It combines flow information with symptoms and longitudinal data to help users see patterns over time and bring objective information into conversations with their clinicians.
A technology challenge, a behavior challenge and a
clinical challenge
Making urinary health information more accessible required solving several interconnected problems at once.
Soundable Health’s R&D team has been developing acoustic AI capable of extracting meaningful signals from real-world body sounds, while building on widely available consumer platforms such as smartphones and exploring new sensing opportunities across connected devices.
But an algorithm alone does not create access.
Users must know how to collect a good measurement in an uncontrolled home environment. They must understand an unfamiliar health metric, trust the information they receive, and know how it fits into their broader health journey.
That makes the product experience inseparable from the underlying technology.
For the proudP design team, the challenge was particularly unusual. Bathroom behavior is private and difficult to observe directly. The product introduces technology into a routine that people have performed largely without thought for decades. And many users encounter concepts such as urine flow rate for the first time through proudP.
Product, R&D and clinical teams therefore work closely together rather than treating technology, clinical evidence and user experience as separate layers. Inputs from patients and clinicians continuously shape how measurements are collected, how results are communicated, and how the technology itself evolves.
“We weren’t redesigning an existing digital experience. We were asking people to adopt a completely new behavior around one of the most private parts of everyday life,” said Eunjin Hong, Product Designer at Soundable Health. “Every design
decision is connected to the technology, patient psychology, clinical evidence, and what physicians actually need from the information.”
Patients challenged an early assumption
One of the team’s biggest questions during early development was whether older adults would readily adopt this new behavior.
Soundable Health and its early clinical collaborators initially anticipated that asking patients to bring a smartphone into the bathroom, follow a specific measurement process, and interpret unfamiliar urinary health information could require substantial education and repeated training.
What the team observed was more encouraging and, in some ways, counterintuitive.
When the experience fit naturally into an existing routine and instructions appeared at the right moments, users often adopted the behavior more naturally than the team had initially expected. The experience helped challenge a common assumption that older adults necessarily require extensive training to adopt an unfamiliar digital health behavior.
That insight changed how the team thought about accessibility.
“We learned that our job wasn’t simply to teach people more,” Hong said. “It was to remove the things they shouldn’t have to learn in the first place. The technology should fit into their lives, rather than asking them to reorganize their lives around the technology.”
The team continued refining instructions, visual cues, error feedback, result interpretation, and longitudinal views based on patient behavior and feedback from clinicians.
A particularly important moment came when a user spontaneously told the team that they wanted to show their proudP results to their doctor.
For Hong, it shifted the design question from “Can someone successfully complete the test?” to “Does the information become meaningful enough that someone wants to act on it?” That question shaped how she designed the result and longitudinal views that followed.
“as a person who worries often about my health with family history, this tool allowed me to take time to look at myself, I mean my symptoms, in a clear point of view with numbers.”
Designing information that can move between home and
healthcare
The other side of the challenge is making information collected at home useful in a clinical conversation.
A patient may describe a stream as “slower than before,” for example, but subjective recollection alone may not capture how urinary function varies from one void to another or changes over time.
By enabling repeated measurements during everyday life, proudP can give patients a more structured record of what they have been experiencing and something concrete to bring into a healthcare conversation.
For clinicians, the goal is not to replace clinical evaluation. It is to make the period before and between visits more informative by adding real-world data alongside patient-reported symptoms.
Dr. Bilal I. Chughtai, MD
“A ground-breaking app that gives you a window into the voiding habits and patterns of patients previously unobtainable… It greatly helps with my education of patients and decision-making on treatment selection.”
This interaction between patient behavior, clinical needs, product design and sensing technology continues to shape proudP’s development.
Today, proudP is used by more than 58,000 people and more than 140 urologists in the United States. Users have recorded more than 610,000 urine flow measurements, and the technology has contributed to 46 clinical publications.
For Soundable Health, those numbers also represent something larger: health information that historically required a specific place, device, or clinical encounter can increasingly become part of everyday life.
The latest international design recognition reflects the multidisciplinary work required to make that transition possible.
Great healthcare design is not simply about making sophisticated technology easier to use. It requires understanding the technology, the clinical context, human behavior, and the deeply personal circumstances in which people interact with their health.
For proudP, those challenges cannot be solved in silos.
They are one design problem.
About Soundable Health
Soundable Health develops digital health technologies that make meaningful health information more accessible in everyday life. The company combines proprietary acoustic AI, consumer
devices, clinical research, and human-centered design to transform body sounds and real-world behaviors into actionable health insights.
Its urinary health platform, proudP, helps people measure and better understand urinary flow at home and bring objective information into conversations with healthcare professionals.
