Background

We are team MARY (Mohan, Andrea, Roly, and Yingyang) and we are currently taking an Introduction to Physical Computing course at Carnegie Mellon University. For the final project, our team was paired up with Maria, an older person who we were assigned to create a useful implement for. In order to come up with an idea for a useful implement for Maria, we first needed to talk with her face to face to face to identify areas in her life where she could use help. Unfortunately, on the week we were supposed to conduct our initial interviews, Maria was on a cruise, which provided some complications for us. We tried to conduct a FaceTime interview with her on October 30th, but that wasn’t very fruitful, especially since we couldn’t get FaceTime to work so we had to do a phone call instead. When she got back, we were able to go visit her house on November 8th and talk to her in person, which was a little more helpful than the first interview.

Meeting Agenda

(Note: the agenda below is for our first meeting over the phone)

Goal: Get to know Maria, let Maria get to know us, ask about what her life is like and how we could help her

Introductions:

• Talk about ourselves, our skills, what we want to accomplish for the project and the meeting, then ask her to do the same- what does she expect from us?

Questions:

Personal Life

• What is your daily routine like?
• What do you like doing for fun?
• Who do you live with and where?
• Frustrations in your life?

Career

• What is your job?
• What does that involve?
• If you don’t have a job, do you miss having a job?
• Do you have anything you think replaces the role of your previous job?

Hobbies

• Do you have any major hobbies/time-consuming activities?
• Is there anything you used to do, but is harder to do now?

Closing:

• Summary of what we talked about, and tell her what we plan to do until the next time we meet

Meeting Summary

Our First “Meeting”, Over the Phone

The first meeting was held over the phone because Maria was on some Arctic Cruise, and we were unable to get FaceTime to work, which I don’t think would have helped that much.

We began the meeting by introducing each of our team members and talking about some of our interests and skills. We hoped that this would give Maria a good idea of what we were able to do. We then tried to let the conversation flow into talking more about Maria’s daily life and routine to perhaps find a problem ourselves. We let the answers to each question guide us, attempting to hit major points such as her job, hobbies, and other activities.

We learned Maria writes and publishes for her publishing company, she likes to play bridge and garden, she has a son who loves Godzilla, and that she lives with her husband in Churchill.

Maria seemed to be attached to a few ideas of “gadgets” (as she called them) that she had come up with on her own beforehand, instead of letting us find a solution while she talked about her problems. She talked about how her husband leaves their kitchen cabinets open and it frustrates her, but that problem is not necessarily an electronics/Arduino problem. She also discussed her and her friends losing at bridge against her husband, and how a dispenser of chocolate can be made for them, but this is again not a very substantial problem to solve. It was very hard to get her to stray from these ideas.

Overall, this meeting was not extremely conducive to ideation, since the team was not able to get an idea to work off of. 

A photo of us struggling to get FaceTime to work for our first “meeting” with Maria

Meeting Maria in Person and Going to Her House

When Maria returned to Pittsburgh from her cruise, we were able to set up a date for her to drive us to her home (November 8th). This meeting was critical because we had come up with absolutely nothing from the first meeting.

Maria first drove us to her new home, which was still being built. We did not find this particularly interesting or helpful, but Maria was pretty set on showing us her new home. We were more interested in her current living situation to see how she lives and goes about her day; so after a lot of insistence on our part to go to her current home, she finally took us there.

This meeting was more fruitful than the first, but we still couldn’t identify major problem points that we could solve with an Arduino that wasn’t a product that already exists. We also got to see her husband leaving the cabinet doors open, which was fun.

We got to see Maria’s workspace, and it was quite cluttered. There was paper everywhere and in piles. Maria has a publishing company, so this was understandable. However, we learned that Maria has a habit of throwing her papers on the floor and not filing or sorting them, which makes it hard for her to remember what papers she put where. It is important to keep track of where she puts things because she has so many papers to deal with, and throwing them on the floor also makes them hard to reach. Maria has a file cabinet and those desktop paper organizers with the different sections, but she still throws them on the floor anyways.

Although this is more of a laziness/bad habit problem instead of something she is physically unable or difficult to do, it gave us at least something to work with.

Maria driving us to her house

Maria showing us her new home that is being built

Maria’s very cluttered desktop

Finally getting where we want to go

So much paperwork and clutter

She doesn’t remember where she filed her papers away

Maria making some hand gestures

Giving us a tour of her space

Reflection

The first meeting was kind of terrible since it provided no material for us to work with, but the second one provided us with at least something.

For our first conversation, we were frustrated that Maria kept pushing ideas for “gadgets” that she’d come up with instead of letting us get to know her and the difficulties she faces in her daily life. Perhaps we had asked the wrong questions. We thought they were generic enough, but it is difficult when she had already planned out what she wanted to talk about, instead of letting our questions guide her.

It was also difficult for us to get her to understand that we wanted to see her current home, not her new one. When we are faced with a blank space that she doesn’t live in yet, we are unable to see what she is like at home, how she goes about her life, and interacts with her environment.

This post will outline the two meetings that we (Claire and Rory) had with our older teammate, Joanne. These meetings were the first crucial steps for our final project in Physical Computing. The prompt of this project is to create a custom electromechanical device that an older person would find useful. For our team, Joanne is the older person and Claire and Rory will be designing and making the device. Useful can be defined as lot of things in the scope of this project. The device could be something that assists in an everyday task or it could just be something that brings Joanne amusement. The purpose of these initial meetings were to first, get to know Joanne, and then more importantly, discuss areas of her life that she could use some help in or could be improved by a mechatronic mechanism that we would create. The first meeting took place on Tuesday from 9:30am to 10:15am in one of the meeting rooms on the basement floor of Hunt Library. Claire, Rory, and Joanne were all present.

Summary and major Takeaways

Joanne is a very engaged open spirit who is as excited to tell us her ideas as she is to hear ours. Her problems live mostly in the physical realm and rotate around mechanics. If we take the problems her suggestions solve we can get to the root of what she wants fixed and easily create a solution that not only helps her but fits in the parameters of the class in an arduino-like gadget-like kind of way.

Reflection

We wanted a natural organic conversation so our agenda was extremely loose, that being said we are happy we didn’t stick to it. Joanne was sharing and came prepared, she mentioned to us she has been thinking about this meeting a lot and came with an assortment of ideas. The challenge was, while her ideas were interesting they were mostly mechanical and more robotics or electrician based instead of a sort of Arduino scope gadget. We have focused in on one of her ideas escalator shoes, to help her climb the stairs. While it was sort of comedic it represents a larger problem many older people have. While Joanne’s mobility is currently full-ranged she is preparing for her decrease in mobility. So we came to stairs, going up and down stairs can have serious ramifications if there is technology failure so we decided to focus on decreasing instead of eliminating stair use. Joanne lives in a three-story house with her bedroom on the third floor and encounters stairs daily. We realized this potential for a project after our meeting and tried to visualize what would motivate her to go up and downs stairs and how we could decrease that. We came to the conclusion that we need to go to her house to evaluate on how we can help with this task, get to know Joanne more and possibly completely derail our idea.

Next time we would like more than an hour of time, or a open ended schedule at the end of the meeting so we can overflow if necessary. We were having great conversation when other commitments ended the meeting when it felt like we were just starting to get to know her.

We both agree that we wish the meeting could have gone longer but we are satisfied with the information we discovered.

Meeting 2

The goal of this meeting was to assess what we could to to help Joanne use the stairs less but when we spoke to her we found that she already didn’t use the stairs much and was interested in the solution for if she had a relapse of her previous injury, a torn meniscus. So we turned out attention elsewhere, we revisited her lamp post problem. The lamp outside of her home could only be triggered by a switch outside her front door and she also expressed concern about the lack of light for the overall front walkway. She told us about how she had previously walked guests out of the house with a flashlight to make sure they don’t trip. After looking at the layout of the house we realized that the lamp didn’t completely cover all the walkway so we decided that adding a few strips of LEDs triggered by the same thing as the lamp post would help solve the inconvenience of the lamp post switch and the low visibility. We are thinking about using a photo cell inside of the front porch light, the turning on of the  light will trigger the system. That way when Joanne turns on the porch light (from inside of her house) it will trigger a push/pull of the lamp post breaker outside of her home and tell the LEDS to turn on.

The breaker that triggers the lamp post

Front steps

Pathway and lamp post

Team: Joey Santillo, Linda Xia, Catherine Yu

TEAM JOSEPH

We are a group of students at Carnegie Mellon enrolled in Introduction to Physical Computing. For our final project, our team is tasked with prototyping a useful implement for an older person. Using the skills that we’ve learned throughout the semester, we will design a technological prototype that will serve a particular older person’s need.

On Tuesday, October 30th, we met with Joseph, our older friend, in the Hunt Library basement to chat about the project, learn about his everyday life, and identify different needs that he has that can be fulfilled with a technological solution.

Meeting agenda

Introduction

• Go around, introduce our names, majors, and where we’re from. 
• We’re interested in learning about any pain points or issues that you have while going through your daily life.
• Clarify our project goals. 
  • As a group, we’re interested in designing a useful implement that would help you in your daily life.
  • We will engage in an iterative design process, including gathering formative feedback around the midpoint of the process, and using your feedback to iterate and design an improved prototype. 
  • The entire process takes six weeks, from this meeting to the end of the semester, with the final deliverable being a reasonably high-fidelity final product
  • We will be thoroughly documenting our process, taking pictures & notes, and collecting other useful information.
  • We are capable of building sophisticated devices; we had two other large projects to develop expertise with the Arduino software and hardware. 
• Timeline
  • We plan to meet with you at least 2 more times in person.

Interview questions

• What kind of hobbies do you have?
  • Do you have any difficulties with these hobbies?
  • What is a device that could make this hobby easier?
• Can you tell me the last time you ….
  • Felt annoyed at a particular process throughout your day?
• What is something that you have enjoyed doing, but has now become harder to do with age?

(Optional) Crafting

• Can go into the classroom to get materials.
• Mock up a quick, low-fidelity “solution”.

Meeting summary & major takeaways

Notes taken during meeting

Notes took during meeting

The cane cannot stand by itself and it causes interferences and inconveniences when putting on the floor or table. Multiple times during our conversation with Joseph, the cane slid against the table and started to fall, with Joseph automatically catching it before it did.

After brief introductions from our team members, Joseph introduced himself.  At 67 years old, Joseph is a semi-retired, part-time attorney who was born in Philadelphia. As a patient of Parkinson’s disease, Joseph uses different walking aids, such as canes and walkers, in order to supplement his mobility. While is he able to independently get around and take the bus by himself, he has tremor in left arm and occasionally has moments where he “freezes”, or where he is temporarily unable to move.

Another cane he carries around. This cane has four pressure points where it touches the ground, giving it the benefit of being able to stand up by itself, but has the drawback of being unstable on slanted surfaces. Additionally, Joseph noted that he preferred the firmness of a single pressure point, and rocks and ground debris often got stuck between the four pressure points of this cane.

During his younger years, Joseph was very active; he enjoyed camping and playing soccer. Now, he identifies that “being functional” is a major problem in his life and summarizes it as “the effects of surrounding areas on all kinds of canes and walking aids”. He described multiple scenarios where his functionality is limited due to his condition. When he goes to the airport, the slanted path of the jet bridge “looks functional but pushes you down the hallway.” It then becomes difficult to control the speed of his movement when going down slanted surfaces. At home, Joseph brings food from the kitchen to the living room, but the walker he uses is not stable enough to hold food. Additionally, when doing housework in his garage, he often forgets where he left his cane. During our first meeting, Joseph also brought some online research he did on walking aids, which helped us better understand the different types of canes and walkers on the market currently, and better imagine what possible custom features we can integrate into the product that would help Joseph increase his mobility.

Prior to our meeting, Joseph printed out different webpages of canes and walkers that are sold online, and spent time to describe each of their features and how it can aid with everyday mobility for Parkinson’s patients.

Joseph’s sketch of condition, symptom, limitation.

At the end of the meeting, Joseph suggested us to research Parkinson’s disease — to look into the conditions, symptoms, and limitations, and attack the problem by “meeting conditions and symptoms under limitation”.

Sketches Joseph made to describe uses and flaws of his walker

Thoughts & Discussion

While we couldn’t research Joseph over the weekend by email, we were able to call him on short notice that following Monday and schedule a quick meeting that same day. We really appreciate Joseph moving his schedule around and taking the time to meet us on campus. Due to time constraints, we were unable to meet him in his home; we are hoping in a future meeting, we will be able to meet him in his home, see the many different types of canes and walkers that he has, how he uses them with his usual tasks at home, and develop a better understanding of his current solutions and living environment.

The meeting did not quite follow our agenda. Joseph had thoroughly thought about this project and did his research prior to the meeting. He had already prepared several suggestions on how to improve his walking aids, and let us know which features he liked the most out of all of his canes and walkers. It was incredibly helpful that he had brainstormed possible solutions already, and we discussed them in depth during the meeting. The conservation was very fluid, informative, and easy, because he answered all of our questions before we asked them, and he asked us some questions for clarification for this project. However, many of the problems he identified involved mechanical solutions that did not fit the technological scope of this project. Perhaps we should have emphasized earlier on that our class focuses on creating interactive objects with embedded behaviors. We think that we could have done better by directing the conversation to focus more on understanding his current mobility problems (rather than solutions from the get-go) which could have given us the flexibility to brainstorm more openly together, and additionally find design opportunities in the physical computing domain.

For the final project of Introduction to Physical Computing, The Weavers, which consists of Jenny, Megan, and Ghalya, was assigned to create an assistive device for a member of the Pittsburgh community. After being paired up, on October 30, The Weavers met up with Rivka Herbert, a CMU grad who lived 15 minutes away from campus. This meeting lasted for about an hour and a half and was held in her home to discuss her day to day life and the challenges she had in hopes that The Weavers could alleviate some of those hardships.

MEETING AGENDA

We planned to meet in Rivka’s home, and communicated through messages with her and with each other.

Breakdown of roles:

-one person talking (Megan)

-one person talking notes (Ghalya)

-one person doing both/ filling in the gaps (Jenny)

Idea questions:

• What were your hobbies or passions growing up?
  • Why did you like doing these hobbies or things, what about them was enjoyable?
  • Do you still maintain these interests? How?
• Can you show us around your house? What is your morning routine like?
• Is there any part of the day that you look forward to?
  • Why do you look forward to this?
• How do you socialize?
• Ask about pets, family, etc.
• Walk me through a typical day..
• What is something you wish you had help with?
• What is you least favorite thing?
• What’s your favorite thing to do?

These are just some idea questions, just in case the conversation gets stuck. But basically,  our plan was to have a natural conversation and not make it feel like a strictly formal exchange.

MEETING SUMMARY & TAKEAWAYS

Rivka showing us how she measures out her threads for her looms

One of Rivkas favorite looms.

Rivka’s skein and ball winder in action.

One iteration of the weaving process.

A large question we wanted to ask was what hobbies she is involved in. We found out here that she is an avid weaver, and from this point on most of the interview involved learning more about her weaving; what she liked, what she didn’t, and how we could possibly help. This is where going to her house came the most in handy; she got to personally show us most of the steps in the process, and even got to bring back a ball weaver to study.

Conversation started pretty naturally- Rebecca is a naturally outgoing person which made it easy to start talking in a way that didn’t feel forced or uncomfortable. We started with having a general conversation, and in the car ride we guided the conversation to cover the interview topics that we were interested in- so it felt more natural than a stereotypical interview.

We decided on making an automatic ball winder because it’s a part of her weaving process that’s very tedious and time consuming, and usually ends with her elbow hurting. Automatic ball winders are expensive, and don’t have all the features that she would like in one- so we plan on constructing one that measures distance, checks for knots, and winds.

Find a copy of our notes and annotated images here: Proj3 Interview

AFTER THOUGHTS

Going to Rebecca’s house was a very valuable experience; it’s one thing to be told that someone likes weaving, and another to see how her home and style of living is affected by her weaving. In the car, we did not pay as much attention when she said that she likes weaving, but in her home we saw evidence of how it was seeping into every aspect of her home and life; she had looms in each room, and different spaces dedicated to different parts of the process.

Afterwards, we were a little wary because Rebecca seemed to somewhat lead us towards the idea of making an automatic ball winder- however we also discussed other possible ideas, and the others didn’t seem like they would have as large of an impact, or they were too complex to create.

We feel as if our interview went really well, and there’s not much we would change for next time; the conversation went smoothly, seeing her home helped us tremendously, and we learned what we needed to. We think we could have asked more questions- not having to do with weaving- but overall we are all satisfied.

With the sole goal of getting to know Jim better (as well as ideate some possible contraptions that he would appreciate) we set our agenda to have two main steps: the first was to learn about Jim, and the second was to talk about some things he would appreciate. We wanted the discussion to be organic and genuine, one where Jim could tell us about all the things that he appreciated, didn’t appreciate as much, and wished he could improve. With this in mind, we came up with a few guiding questions, asking the rest as the conversation flowed. Those, along with the meeting agenda, are as follows:

The meeting itself yielded some very interesting observations. The first, main observation is that Jim is extremely involved in his community, lending his time and knowledge to anyone who asks. This, however, leads to an extremely busy schedule, whereby Jim often forgets important materials he needs. To remedy this, he asked us to build him a device that can remind him to take what he needs before he leaves.

A rough sketch Jim drew of what he was looking for.

With such a clear idea of what Jim wanted, we jumped right into ideation. Jim showed us pictures of his house and front door (ask the authors if you want to see this for planning purposes), where he wanted the device, and explained to us the way he wanted the device set up. To trigger the screen to turn on and remind Jim of what he needed, we decided to add a motion sensor to the device. As soon as it detects motion by the door, Jim would be reminded to take everything he needs for that day.  Since his office is right next to the front door and he walks in and out of there a lot, he decided that he would rather not have the device light up when he goes near there, but would much rather have it light up when he is walking through his foyer. In addition, to avoid having to unnecessarily use the screen when he is getting the mail or taking out the trash, we decided that the screen would have a “cancel” capability. Since Jim’s daily supplies change often, we also decided on setting up a user interface on his computer so that he can set his reminders from there and see them on his screen when he is ready to leave.

Coming out of the meeting, we were glad to have a clear-cut idea, but we realized implementation would be slightly more complicated than expected. Since we need to set up a user interface and have motion sensors possibly in another part of the home, we decided to set up a server that can take care of managing all triggers and inputs. Additionally, our initial idea was to implement a break-beam sensor in one part of the house that would be the only trigger to the door dashboard, but additional thought and some limitations (normal break-beam sensors have a range of only a few inches) led us to choose a motion sensor instead. An additional benefit of that is that the motion sensor can work over a much better range, as well as not have to be installed wirelessly. The server would still be needed for the user interface, though. We decided to host this server on a Raspberry Pi connected to an Arduino ESP82, which would take care of all triggers and inputs. These two working in conjunction, we decided would be optimal for Jim based on the feedback he sent us.

Important snippets from meeting notes (that eventually guided our final idea) are as follows:

On November 1st, our group (David, Caroline and Chloé) met up with Jeffrey, an older man participating in the Osher program next to our physical computing lab, with the intention of building him a useful device. In order to do so, it was necessary for our group to gain a better understanding of who he was as a person: what he enjoyed doing, what tasks he had issues completing, what the course of his day looked like. We bought him a coffee and sat down to talk about his life.

our meeting agenda

• Introduction to our past projects
• Talk about assistive device research, how we started by doing it for ourselves
• Show each individual project and talk about our technical abilities
• Ask Jeffrey to tell us about himself, including his habits and self-identified personality traits.
• Ask Jeffrey to share an experience he has really enjoyed recently.
• Ask Jeffrey to tell us about his hobbies/what he enjoys doing in his free time.
• Ask Jeffrey when was the last time he felt frustrated with something in his home and at work.

Meeting summary and major takeaways

As we started the conversation with questions mainly in two directions: Jeffrey’s interest and problems he faces, the discussion initially carried out with emphasis on Jeffrey’s personal interest, daily activities and the arrangement of his house. However, we later discovered that when talking about his own life, he talked a lot about his granddaughter Stella, for example, his granddaughter’s favorite shows, his granddaughters’ hobbies, his granddaughters’ achievements in primary school and so on. Thus, with more questions focusing on interactions between his granddaughter and him, we discovered that he and his wife moved to Pittsburgh actually to help their son taking care of their granddaughter.

However, Jeffrey also acknowledged that he rarely participates in Stella’s favorite activity in spare time: cooking, since this always create a huge mess in the kitchen. Therefore, we thought it would be meaningful to create an implement that can let Jeffrey and Stella share some meaningful time together and enhance their understanding for each other. This eventually became the main focus of the talk, yet before coming down to this thought, we have drifted through a lot of other options, for example, making a comparatively intelligent suitcase for Jeffrey, since he suggested that he needs a “self-driving” suitcase to carry his lecture materials around, which is obviously too hard to be finished in such a short duration of time.

Also, he proposed that if we are trying to make anything related to his hobby of playing tennis, it could be something that improves his forehand. These options generally turned out to be too hard for us as the course project and there was not much we can improve for these options.

Therefore, even though we discussed broadly with Jeffrey from different aspects of his life, eventually we narrow down to his interaction with his granddaughter.

Meeting with Jeffrey in the cafe.

our thoughts after holding the meeting and discussing as a team

Jeffrey is very approachable, so the whole meeting followed our agenda and went very smoothly. Although he is a retired man, he has a really busy schedule and teaches several courses at the same time. We tried to start brainstorm from the problems he met during the daily life but found that he seemed to keep everything in order while what he suggested us to build is too hard, making us a little overwhelmed at one point. Finally,  we decided to start our design with his interaction with his granddaughter.

Ideation sketching during group meeting

The first interview was done in a university cafe because time was tight. The whole team thought the discussion was going well, but we would like to visit him at his house next time so that we could observe the details of his life more carefully, and also communicate with his wife and granddaughter, which would be very helpful for us to know Jeffrey better.

Chloé Desaulles

Jiatian Sun

Jianxiao Ge