Team: Dani, Evan, Daniel

INTRODUCTION

This project was designed to build a functioning device that can improve or help the daily life of disabled people. Our team, team AMY, was set to design an assistive device for Amy Shannon. Shannon had a spinal cord injury because of an accident before her 13^th birthday. From that accident, she injured her C4 spinal cord, and half of her body got paralyzed especially with her legs and her hands.

In this interview, we are trying to learn her daily life route and her life so that we can understand her situation and build some device that can improve her life. Daniela Delgado, Daniel Moon, and Evan Tipping are planning to derive several ideas after finishing her interview, which will be discussed at end of the word press.

AGENDA

Before our interview, we prepared some possible questions to ask her in anticipation of how she might respond or how we might help her extract and identify problems in her daily life should the need arise. Our agenda is below:

Before we started an interview, we have discussed possible questions to ask Shannon to improve the quality of her interview. We used a google word document to gather some questions online and performed our meeting by using the Zoom meeting.

Here are some example questions we wrote on our Word Doc.

Question 1.

Can you walk us through a typical day in your life? What are some of the major events within your day and do you have any daily rituals?

Question 2.

Do you find certain daily tasks to be more frustrating to complete than others? Why?

Question 3.

Is there anything that you want to get into? A new hobby maybe?

Question 4.

If you had a device to help you with this task, how prevalent within your living space would you like it to be? Do you want it to be portable and on your person or stationary?

Through our interview planning, we have improved our quality a lot.

MEETING SUMMARY & MAJOR TAKEAWAYS

At the start of our conversation when we were introducing each other and ensuring that everyone was on the same page about the project deliverables, Amy began by noting that she did not have any particular ideas as to what type of device she would like or what she would like it to do – furthermore, she said that she wasn’t the best at coming up with ideas on-the-spot, and so she was a bit nervous that we wouldn’t leave the interview with many actionable concepts (Also, as a side note, having her comment that she wasn’t the best at on-the-spot thinking was very helpful to us as the next item on our agenda, after the project timeline overview, was an icebreaker activity where we all would come up with assistive device ideas quickly to get the ball rolling. We scrapped this part of the interview and jumped into questions about her daily life instead to avoid putting her in a potentially uncomfortable situation). We assured her that we would all work together to figure out a concept she was excited about and that she didn’t have to have any ideas for our project to bring to the table, just herself and her story. From here, we jumped into the meat and potatoes of the interview, where she told us about her daily life, her injury during adolescence which lead to her disability, and what she likes to do for fun (both by herself and with her aids and parents).

Throughout the interview, Amy introduced us to her attendant, April, who helps her in the morning and evenings to get ready for the day or for bed, walk her through muscle strengthening exercises, and assist her with tasks such as scrolling through shows on Netflix or completing her jewelry designs. Amy also spoke about her current assistive devices, such as her joy-stick controlled wheelchair, her splits which allow her to maintain wrist and ankle placement, her voice recognition software which helps her navigate her computer easier, and the camelback which she keeps attached to her chair so she doesn’t have to ask people to help her get water.
One interesting thing that she noted was that while you may think that something is a useful assistive device, such as a voice-controlled smart environment (i.e. an Amazon Alexa), in reality it’s not as helpful to a disabled person as you may believe. For instance, she doesn’t use voice-controlled speakers instead of asking April or another aid to use a remote to choose a TV show to watch because sometimes she doesn’t know what she specifically would like and just wants to see the options. A voice-controlled device requires a specific command, and so she doesn’t find them very helpful most of the time, even though she said most people would think that it would be helpful.

During the second half of the interview, we shifted from what she currently does in her day towards what she likes doing, even if it’s not a daily thing for her. This is when she got on the topic of art! She has always had an interest in all types of arts and crafts and carried that with her into life, getting her Masters’ degree from CMU in Arts Management. She likes different types of painting, and right now is interesting in acrylic pour styles of painting, but has stopped painting like she used to because there is a mismatch of assistive devices.
To paint, she needs an easel to rest the canvas on, her wheelchair, a mouthstick (which she described as a mouth guard-like device which has a paintbrush attached to it, allowing her to paint with her mouth), and someone to give her the paints. Her mouthstick is uncomfortable to use for prolonged periods of time, but she would still use it to paint until she got a new wheelchair which doesn’t let her close enough to her easel to paint.

We began to see if she’d be interested in a device that would allow her to create art in a more independent way since she loves it but is currently facing many barriers to it. Amy seemed to be really excited about the idea and so, with that, we began to wrap up the interview since we were about to go over an hour and it was late evening and so we didn’t want to keep her. We let her know that we would be in touch and are currently working on maintaining an open line of communication with her to make sure that she’s just as excited as we are in the project’s direction!

While this documentation outlines a basic overview of our meeting, we also decided to record the interview, with Amy’s consent, for future reference and personal documentation purposes. Furthermore, Dani and Daniel also typed notes throughout our conversation with Amy to see if there were any differences when it came to takeaways or things to note amongst the group.

Dani’s Notes Document

Daniel’s Notes Document

Major Interview Takeaways:

• Amy has limited movement due to a C4 spinal injury she got as a young teen. She needs assistance throughout the day to complete her daily tasks because of it
• Amy needs to use both hands to pick objects up but has enough movement with her hand to use a joystick
  • She is currently going more strengthening and mobility exercises and is excited about her progress
  • She uses many types of assistive devices, ranging from physical splints to speech recognition software
• It’s important to ask if something is actually helpful to a person with a disability instead of making assumptions
  • Some things that you think would be helpful actually are not (or at least is subjective)
  • Don’t make assumptions on what people can or cannot do – let them tell you
• Amy loves all types of art and would like to do more without having to ask for as much assistance as she currently has to
  • There are many mismatches between her assistive devices which are currently causing barriers for her when it comes to painting

REFLECTION AND TEAM THOUGHTS

Overall, our interview with Amy took a more conversational tone; we used our interview agenda as a guide to lead the overall structure of the interview, but didn’t stick to a strict “next question on the agenda and answer” format, instead opting to ask impromptu followup questions based her comments and seeing where this lead us. We looped back to our agenda on occasion to ensure that all of the topics we wanted to cover were discussed, but most of our interview was us talking to Amy about her day-to-day life, what she likes to do, and what she wished she could do more during this time. While this proved to be an effective way for us to generate ideas with Amy since she wasn’t sure as to what she wanted, this approach may not be as helpful when interviewing other people who may prefer to give shorter and less anecdotal responses.

Furthermore, we wish that we could’ve incorporated more generative interviewing tactics to have a more active brainstorming session of ideas but, as we were unsure as to what her capabilities were to draw and she mentioned that she didn’t like on-the-spot thinking too much, we thought it was better to not interrupt the flow of conversation (as there weren’t many lulls in our interview which was a pleasant surprise!) by trying an activity.

After the interview and discussing the general direction of what type of project we wanted to make – an assistive device that facilitates the creation of art – we each began to generate concepts as to what this could look like. This allowed us to see where we were aligned as a group in terms of interests and where we weren’t: we all liked the idea of making painting easier for her by alleviating some of the mismatches she is experiencing when painting, but we didn’t have exact alignment on what type of device can provide the most succinct solution. We are currently leaning towards having there be a rig which moves a paintbrush by detecting and exaggerating her hand movements, but since we want to keep a clear line of communication with Amy to ensure that she’s happy with our project directions, we have sent her some of our sketches and are trying to coordinate another follow-up Zoom call to discuss her thoughts on them.

Ultimately, while our interview ended up deviating from our exact plan, we had a robust and fun conversation with Amy which let us get to know her better as a person and as a client. We are excited to continue to work with her throughout this process and see how far we can go with our project concept!

In preparation for our group to start the final project, our team of Sruti Srinidhi, Jina Lee, and Connor McGaffin, interviewed our client, Elaine Houston, so that we are able to design an assistive device that caters towards her, a person with physical disabilities. Before meeting with Elaine, we sat down and debriefed on our intent, goals, learning objectives, and secondary research. Our team purposefully went through this process so that when we interviewed with our client, we would have a strong understanding of what we need to ask and know. From our research, we were able to enter the interview with a lot of background information about Elaine, making it easier for us to emphasize and have a comfortable conversation. Due to the current situation, we understand the constraints that we will face, but we plan to create a design that is as accurate as we can make through various mediums like a simulator version and digital renderings of our prototype.

Agenda

Before our interview, we prepared by making an interview script and doing research about Elaine Houston through her website and other online sources. Our team wanted to make sure that we were all on the same page with the project, so created our own overall brief. This was extremely helpful for all of us to get a better understanding of what we plan our outcome to be at the end of this project. In addition, getting started through this process was insightful and allowed us to thoroughly prepare for our interview! After doing research, we created “How Might We Questions” to develop a stronger understanding of what we would like to takeaway for the overall project.

Here is the brief that our team created!

Here are the resources we used to learn more about Elaine!

From the preparation, we were able to start creating interview questions. Our overall goal from these questions was to help her identify problems in her daily life that she wants an intervention in. We initially wanted to record our session, but due to some reasons, we were unable to. Fortunately, we were able to have our whole team note-take and interview at the same time. We split our questions into three sections: Warm up/About, What Accessibility Means to Elaine, and Wrap up. We split up the questions this way so that we were able to get the best understanding about Elaine. We weren’t able to ask all the questions due to our interview running longer than expected, but we were glad we had this structure. In the future, we plan on following a stricter structure so that we can touch up and talk about all the topics to help our project.

Here is the interview script that we had planned.

After our interview, it was interesting to see how we all note-take slightly differently. Some only used the document to type up the notes, while others used handwriting to jot notes while also typing. Seeing this difference was nice to get to know each others’ work styles! Here is our link for those that would like to get a more in-depth view of our interview and process: link.

Here is a part of the napkin that one of the team members wrote on so that after the interview, they would be able to go back to the document and calmly reflect and add their notes.

Here are all the notes combined on a google docs!

Summary and key takeaways

The interview was quite informative and eye opening to us. As a team, we were able to learn a lot about how tasks that seem so trivial to us, like rolling a dice, can be a challenge to others.

Most of the interview was consumed by Elaine talking about the different projects she has worked on and how these devices help her in her daily life. This really helped us understand her lifestyle, interests, and her problems. She talked about how her service dog who has a RFID reader and can identify and press different buttons for her, like in an elevator. Adding to that, she mentioned that her service dog often gets confused when there is a label on a button. This concern was extremely interesting in the sense that the confusion came from human-made choices i.e someone putting a sign covering the button or the button and the platform it is on are both metal. These examples were things that we all thought were surprising and unexpected, because of the irony that it was another human that caused the problem, when we typically expect that we are supposed to help and not make more difficulties. She also talked about how she struggled to play laser tag with the regular devices and so built herself a switch that she could easily use to play the game. With that device, to make it more fair, able-body users would have constraints to “make the playfield more fair.” This type of thinking was very new to the whole team, but very eye-opening and helpful. 

After a long conversation about her different experiences, Elaine began explaining the problems she faces on a daily basis. She started off by talking about how she struggles to open clamshell packaging. She emphasized that she constantly has to use her mouth to open packaging but even that sometimes gets very challenging. Some of her friends come to her house and meal prep, and in the process, they close her jars too tight, which she then struggles to open. Furthermore, she talked about how she finds it challenging to roll a dice and play games and would love for there to be a device that could simulate the roll of a dice with just one button. She then continued to emphasize the idea of cross ability, which is essentially bridging the gaps between people’s abilities and placing them on similar playing fields, which was quite interesting and something we are definitely looking into.

Reflection

Overall, the meeting did not follow the plan we had in mind. Initially, we wanted to follow a more structured framework, hence our preperation, but as we started the interview, it started to become more conversational. The interview lasted much longer than we expected. It was less than an hour and a half. Due to Elaine’s extensive experience with engineering, it was much harder to extract what she found difficult, because she had or was in the process of solving those problems herself. It seemed that the majority of the meeting involved Elaine talking about the different devices she has built and how she went about doing that. It was great to listen to as she is very knowledgeable and we learned a lot from it. However, it was not particularly helpful in giving us the insight required to build an assistive device for her. In addition, it was quite difficult to steer her in the direction we wanted as she passionately spoke about the work she has done for long periods of time, making it difficult for us to steer her back to the original questions. Eventually, she did come around to talking about the problems she faced but the solutions to her problems were more mechanical than those that required the arduino. Or they were solutions that did not require electronic devices at all. Many of the problems she suggested seemed to be out of our control and/or were too broad and complex for us beginners. It was extremely interesting for her to educate us about creating devices that help cross able-body and non-able body users. This type of thinking was very new to all of us and was a big interest, however, due to our lack of experience it is an extremely difficult and complex concept for us to work on. After the interview, as a team, we were able to discuss and analyze the data we collected from our interview. However, the results that we got weren’t exactly what we had hoped for. In the end, since the whole team had the same takeaways from the interview, we were unable to come up with a good enough device idea to build for the project. Looking back to our secondary research, we were able to go through Elaine’s website where she talks about her interest in music. We then decided to take this route and proposed the idea of a button based musical instrument for her. Because we want our product to cater towards Elaine, we sent her our proposal for the musical device and are still waiting for a response. We want to create a device that not only helps us exemplify the skills we learned from the class, but also be something that Elaine is interested in. Our main goal for this project is to develop a device that Elaine would want to use, so her feedback is extremely crucial to our next steps.  

In order to begin our final project of creating an assistive device specifically catered to address the needs of a disabled person, our team of Claire and Arleen, along with Mimi and Carl, interviewed our target that we would me making an assistive device for, Brenda. Of course, due to the special circumstances of the semester being virtual, our anticipated end result would be as close to a cohesive product as possible, like including a prototype, schematic, simulator version, and more, but not a physical working final end product. By interviewing her, we got a better sense of her lifestyle and particular needs depending on the struggles she experienced in her day-to-day life.

Agenda

Before our interview, we prepared some possible questions to ask her in anticipation of how she might respond or how we might help her extract and identify problems in her daily life should the need arise. Our agenda is below:

Interview Questions

1. How are you? How are you doing? What did you do today (but don’t be so direct?)?
2. Ask permission to record interview
3. Clarify project goals and purpose of today’s interview to get ideas, also mention we are not professionals so we’re not building an actual device
4. Have there been any sort of frustrations or difficulties in your life recently? (Both physically and mentally) (Ask follow ups and start ideating if we get a lead from this)
   1. If it seems like she’s having a difficult time thinking of one from top of her head try to lead her by giving her examples) conducting your job / mobility issues / communication (esp. During video calls) 
5. Backup/guiding questions:
   1. What is your daily routine like?
   2. Can you demonstrate any task you find somewhat difficult?
   3. What kind of tools do you use? What kind of improvements would you like to make to these tools? Is there any that you think would be useful but you don’t have/doesn’t exist yet/too unreasonably expensive to get?

*Ask what she does and then wait for the answer – and as a follow up ask how she does it.

Summary/Takeaways

Our meeting mostly consisted discussing ideas of problems Brenda thought up prior to the meeting (we didn’t have to do much digging for issues). Going into the meeting, she already had a good sense and awareness of the daily life and came well-prepared with several ideas to share with us, which we recorded in our notes and present below:

• Idea 1: Brenda has good use of right side of body (better than her left, but lost some range in shoulders due to age so she can’t grab the backpack from behind her chair, so having some sort of button or lever to bring backpack to side and put back behind her chair easily would make retrieving things more convenient.
  • Some considerations were that there were already several moving parts to her chair we could not interfere with, and such a design would need mechanical infrastructure.

A visual of how Brenda’s backpack strapped onto the back of her chair currently looks like

• Idea 2: Have a remote control to move table stand around to fine tune without having to manually adjust; a possibility is to mount a motor to have driver to adjust for better visual interaction.
  • The table stand has a square base around 20 pounds, so the base to control the stand would have to be very sturdy.
• Idea 3: There’s no flat point on back of her phone case to attach a pop socket or kickstand to hold it up well, and her phone is too big to pick up herself with commercial reachers when she drops it.
• Idea 4: She cannot reach her foot plates since its too far down, so she wants to automate or make flipping the foot plates easier.
• Idea 5: Her tablet supporter is a little bulky so she wants to automate it into a swinging tablet stand that is safe and stable to conserve space.

Brenda’s current tablet stand is shown; it takes up her entire armrest so she wants to be able to move it away easily

• Idea 6: Brenda can’t open windows herself, and she dislikes AC but likes fresh air coming in, so she wants an automatic window opener or something for her favorite window since commercial ones are too expensive.
• Idea 7: She has an overhead lift from bedroom to bathtub to drop her into the tub, can’t reach faucet to turn water herself because of placement from where sitting in the tub.

Through our discussion of ideas, we also got a better sense of exactly how she was disabled, information which may be useful later on when making considerations for the design solutions to her problems. We compiled our list of her limitations and preferences below:

• Brenda has very limited movement on the left side of her body, so mostly any mobility is done with her right side.
  • This has led to full extension capability in her right arm and half extension of her left arm.
• She lacks coordination in her arms and wrists, but she can move her fingers easily.
• She can occasionally move her legs, but not by much.
• Her vision is not great.
• She has limited shoulder range and movement due to her age.
• Brenda already possesses a lot of assistive technologies and has a lot of knowledge in this area, so many of her ideas actually revolve around automating items she already owns.
• In her daily life, she likes to cook, spends lots of time in her car, and enjoys feeling like she has free space to move around, thus preferring assistive devices that don’t increase clutter, but actually allow her the functionality of stashing them away.

Discussion

We found the meeting very insightful as it was the first time either of us had done an interview like this before, in which we were trying to find out more about a person’s life to identify any problems we could solve for them. Going in, we definitely expected it to be a lot more difficult to extract ideas from Brenda’s daily routine, but it was very unexpected when we went into the interview with several supplemental questions prepared only for her to dive straight into presenting her ideas based on problems and inconveniences she realized herself.

It was definitely a relief on our end that she was so decisive and direct with her ideation, however, as the interview progressed with her presenting more and more of her problems and solution ideas, we started to realize a trend in which many of her issues actually had mechanical solutions rather than electrical ones that were somewhat beyond the scope of this course. For example, the phone stand supporter was a purely mechanical issues that would require no electrical, especially no Arduino, components to solve. The same goes for the tool that would help rotate her backpack – it would require carefully designed customized mechanical parts rather than electrical. After the interview, it was slightly disappointing that we didn’t walk away with any stellar ideas that we were confident in, as all the solutions were easy to turn into electrical devices.

Looking back, we definitely would’ve liked to clarify the scope of our project and abilities a bit further, emphasizing that our solutions would need to focus heavily on the electrical portions, which might have steered the conversation in a different direction and led to some other problem ideas better suited for our skill set. We hope to speak to Brenda once more to discuss the ideas in a new direction and try to gear them more towards including electrical components – if time and schedule allow.

On November 3rd, Carl, Arleen, Clair and Mimi meet with Brenda over zoom to conduct an interview. Carl and Mimi are on Team Brenda 1. The purpose of this interview was to learn about some difficulties that Brenda faces in her life and begin ideation about the possible assistive devices we could make with an arduino to fix those problems. 

Meeting Agenda:

Introductions

-name, major, year, fun fact, something you enjoy doing

Ask if we can record

Outline of project/ reminders about scope of project (covid-19)

45 min – 1 hour meeting

Questions:

• Q: What drew you to want to participate?
• A:
• Q: Is there anything in particular that you want us to know about/ want us to make for you?
• A:
• Q: Are there any particular difficulties that you face on a regular basis that you would like to describe to us?
• A:
• Q: What is your daily routine like?
• A:
• Q: Have the client try to think of something that they used to enjoy doing, which has become harder over time for any reason
• A:
• Q: is there anything you want us to know about that we haven’t discussed yet?

More Free form questions + extra notes:

Draw ideas on tinkercad/ use whiteboard if needed:

Conclusion:

Meeting Summary:

 The meeting started off with introductions and after that Brenda started to share some of the ideas that she had come up with prior to the interview. These ideas included making her iPad stand motorized, creating a way for her to reach the items in her backpack, making it so her foot plates on her wheelchair can automatically flip up and a better phone case. We asked more specific questions about these problems to get a better understanding of what specific features she wanted each device to have. She also showed us what a couple of the things looked like so we could get a better idea of how we needed to construct the project. Afterwards we asked more general questions to learn about what her day to day looks like. When she would describe something that she was having trouble with we would ask more questions to see if this was something we could create an assistive device for. Some of the ideas that came from that discussion were an automatic window opener and closer, and a remote controlled way to turn the water on and off for a bathtub. We then learned more general information about Brenda that will help us design a better device for her. For example, her right side has much more mobility than her left side meaning we should design everything in a way so she can use it with her right hand. Lastly, we concluded the meeting with some thank yous and Brenda promised to send us more photos so we could see the space or item we were designing the device for.

Screenshot of Brenda demonstrating how her backpack hangs off her wheelchair

Major Takeaways:

• One of the biggest takeaways was the scope of the project that will be useful for Brenda. She described her childhood as always trying to figure out different ways to accomplish the tasks she couldn’t do. 
  • When talking with me in another interview, Brenda explained how she wanted to play the piano. This drive motivated her to get all of the small exercise sessions out of the way in order to just sit at the keys and practice being able to use her left hand to play. 
• In her more adult life, she has since figured out various ways to complete the broad scoped projects in her life, getting into the bath, cooking, etc. Where she was struggling was more in the detailed oriented or small scoped projects, opening windows, turning on the bath faucets, reaching her backpack, etc. 

Thoughts: 

The meeting was very productive. Brenda came into the meeting with several project ideas for us. Her ideas centered around things that would help her be more independent. There were a couple ideas she had that would not have worked in the scope of our project because there was no electrical or arduino component. Afterwards, we asked some more general questions about her routine and daily struggles and that helped us to formulate more ideas for assistive devices. It was really helpful in the interview when Brenda demonstrated the difficult task or showed us where the device would be placed. This helped us to understand the problem better and think of the best solution.