Introduction

We are Team Andromeda, made up of members Francesca Menendez, Ethan Hu, and Sharon Li. For our final project, we are working with Teri, a person with cerebral palsy who communicates through a digital tablet with a voice assistant, to make her a device that can assist her in some of her everyday activities. Our interview with Teri was held on November 1st, 2022, at 9:30 AM at the CLASS (Community Living And Support Services) center in Pittsburgh, PA. We loved getting to talk to Teri as she was incredibly helpful in the interview process and had lots of ideas of devices that could help her, which made the interview process very interactive.

Teri’s Daily Activities and Beginning to Form Ideas

More Ideation

Meeting Agenda

  • Introductions
    • Go around to give a brief introduction of each group member and give some insight as to who we are in terms of our name, major, interest in the project, and additional information we would like to share about ourselves, such as our past projects in this class.
    • Have our client, Teri, give a similar introduction about herself, including insight into her motivations for volunteering for her project. 
  • Explanation and Clarifications 
    • Share the course website to relay information about the time frame of our course project. 
      • An important date to mention, is November 17th, 2022, when our prototype is due, and they are invited to come for the critique, where we can receive direct feedback from them. 
    • Give a brief overview of the project and explain clearly the objectives of this project and clarify what we are trying to achieve and what we are not trying to do as outlined in the course website notes.
      • We are:
        • Trying to build prototype useful devices
        • Engaging in an iterative design process, including gathering formative feedback around the midpoint of the process
        • Taking about seven weeks to go from this meeting to a reasonably high-fidelity final product
        • Documenting our process
      • We are not:
        • Professional technologists who are experienced in making polished products
        • Planning to build something that will be sold commercially
        • Constrained by any practicality outside of usefulness to the person we’re designing for
        • Likely to invent a totally novel piece of electronics (we combine many existing available components in new ways, but don’t make components)
    • Ask if there are any questions or clarifications needed to be made about this project throughout this portion of this meeting. 
  • Understanding Needs
    • Plan to keep this part more flexible, see how it goes depending on the conversation, and ask guiding questions based on this. The goal is trying to devise possible technological interventions that could aid specific problems or be an addition to her life. 
    • Asking various questions to Teri that could lead to potential discussions about areas of her life such as:
      • See if there are any ideas she has thought of beforehand.
      • Sharing her daily routine. Is there anything that is frustrating for you that you would like to have some help with? 
      • How have you currently worked around some of your problems?
      • Can you demonstrate any of the actions for us or share photos of assistive devices that help you already?
      • Something that you used to enjoy doing that has become harder to do? What are some of your hobbies?
    • Share some possible ideas we could do and mock-up solutions. 
    • Discuss and establish some categories of “problems” or areas we could help in and narrow the conversation towards that.
  • Conclusion
    • Thank Teri, for her time, for allowing us to talk to her more in-depth about this project, and for inviting us to CLASS. 
    • Ensuring we have each other’s contact information. 
    • Take pictures of anything necessary or relevant to our project and a group photo.
    • Reiterating the overall project schedule, specifically where we will be making substantial progress, such as our project ideation and prototype critique.

Meeting Summary and Major Takeaways

Through our meeting with Teri, we learned a lot about her daily activities and some of the hobbies she dabbles in, which helped us steer our ideas toward something that might help add to one of these processes. From the get-go, she was very helpful in describing what are some things that could be improved in her life – we got the impression that she would like a device that allows her to do more things by herself. Because she cannot do some things herself currently, she brought up some things that might help her to become more independent – having a device that would allow her to strap into/take off her foot straps when she pleases was a great idea she contributed. 

Teri’s current foot strap, which is quite loose

Another thing she explained to us was that she struggles with drinking. As part of her cerebral palsy, she cannot suck using a straw or hold a cup up to her mouth. This brought us to another idea, using a robotic arm to allow her to be able to drink a cup of water by herself. However, with the project’s time frame, making sure a robotic arm wouldn’t spill water all over her in the process would be difficult, so we turned our attention to her hobbies to see if there was anything we could do to help her.

George and Teri demonstrating how the tablet is attached and can be unattached from her wheelchair.

After her father, who was present for some of the interviews, mentioned her interest in music, she told us about her weekly music rehearsals using accessible musical instruments with others. We learned that one of the main instruments she uses is simple – a tambourine attached to her leg that she can shake to make sounds. This brought us to our idea of making her an accessible musical instrument that would make music based on the position of her feet on her chair. Our meeting with Teri opened up a lot of pathways for what we could possibly do for this project to assist her in some way, and the ideas we came up with together look to help her become more independent and make her daily activities more enjoyable.

Sketches Developed After Our Interview

Thoughts After Holding the Meeting and Discussing

Our meeting with Teri was awesome, she was eager to talk and interact with us, considering she had some ideas already prepared beforehand. Since we have a relatively loose agenda, everything goes according to plan, if not better. Initially entering the meeting, we were concerned that we would have trouble trying to find what aspects of her life we would be able to build a gadget for her to somehow improve her life. 

However, Teri was very interested in our project and offered us several ideas that we can expand on. It was relatively easy to go from topic to topic and try to ask follow-up questions that could possibly segway into some areas of her life we could help her with and be able to learn more about Teri and her likes and dislikes. It was super nice to get to know her more and try to figure out what she would enjoy in terms of what gadgets we could make for her. Generally, we would not have anything we would want to do differently next time in terms of asking her questions or any questions we wish we would have asked. One thing we did wish to do was probably get a physical measurement of parts of her wheelchair beforehand so it would help us along the way later on, as all of our designs have some connection to her wheelchair. Overall, we all agree that our meeting with Teri went very well. We have gotten a lot of great ideas to work with and understand Teri’s lifestyle with her disability. 

Group Picture!