Firs (Team Amy)

Daniel, Nish, and Kevin are students at Carnegie Mellon University working on a project to build an assistive device for Amy. Amy has a spinal cord injury which leaves her mostly paralyzed from the shoulders down and depends on assistive devices such as her trackball, hospital bed, and wheelchair in her daily life. The purpose of this meeting was to introduce our team to Amy and become more familiar with her specific needs as well as brainstorm devices and functionality that could assist her in daily life.

Meeting Agenda

We discussed our meeting plan during class the day before our interview. The meeting outline agreed on is below. We thought it would be important to try to understand what Amy’s life looks like and how her disability affects her before she gave any ideas for the project so we could ideate while learning about her better.

Introduction

• Introduce ourselves, allow Amy to introduce herself to us (5-7 minutes)
• Ask her abut hobbies/work (5 minutes)
• Why was she interested in working with this class again (2 minutes)

Explain scope of project

• Limited in time/mechanical ability (3 minutes)

Ask about her life/needs (Remainder of time)

• What her disability is and how it limits her
• Ask her to run through her daily life/tasks she struggles with
  • Take note of where utility is lacking vs. could be improved
• Assistive devices/tricks she currently uses
  • How can we model our solution after familiar solutions?
• Ask her for any issues she came into the project wanting addressed
  • Ask follow-up questions to clarify any of her ideas
• Discuss our ideas for devices thought of during the meeting
  • For each device, is it addressing something important?
  • Would it make another aspect more difficult? 

Meeting Summary and Takeaways

Unfortunately our meeting recording had an error so we do not have media from the meeting itself. 

To start the meeting, we introduced ourselves and asked Amy what she does for hobbies and work. She is interested in reading, shopping, decorating, writing, watching tv, and all sorts of art forms. She said that in the past she painted with a mouthstick. She previously worked as a stylist for a fashion/shopping website, but had a bad pressure sore that forced her into bedrest over the past 2 years. We found out that Amy has a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed from the shoulders down, but still has a small amount of motor control in her hands/arms that allows her to use her computer and perform some daily tasks. Pressure sores are common in people with spinal cord injuries like Amy as they are unable to feel anything in certain areas of their body and struggle to shift their bodyweight to prevent them. Amy’s wheelchair can tilt to shift her weight in order to help with her recovery and prevent future pressure sores. One of our initial ideas was to make a device to remind Amy to shift her weight, but we decided against pursuing it after hearing more about the assistive devices she currently uses. After finding out about her hobbies and a small amount about her spinal cord injury, we asked her to run us through her daily life. She cannot get up very fast and needs an attendant to help her out of bed using a lift device such as the one shown below.

Example bed lift from https://101mobility.com/products/patient-lifts/portable-patient-lifts/. This is similar to what Amy showed us on the Zoom call. 

 Every day she needs to complete range of motion exercises which help to stretch and strengthen her muscles to prevent them from contracting into the fetal position due to a lack of use. Her attendant leaves around 2, but throughout the day she likes to read, watch TV,  go on Facebook,  possibly exercise again, run errands, or go on a walk. She used to use a standing aid to assist her exercising before bed, but has been unable to recently due to her pressure sore. After speaking about her routine, we asked about devices and tricks she uses. The two standout things were how she interacts with her computer and the environmental control unit she had in her previous condo. She interacts with her computer by using a trackball that she is able to control with the limited mobility in her hands as well as voice recognition software as a replacement for typing.

Trackball similar to the one Amy uses https://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Expert-Wireless-Trackball-K72359WW/dp/B01936N73I

The trackball was the most important find of the meeting to us, as it gives us an idea of how we could make a device that Amy will be able to interact with by basing our input design off of her current device. The environmental control unit in her old condo was an older device, but she informed us that current models are able to control lights, thermostats, the TV, and certain types of hospital beds like the one she has. From this discussion, we found that she currently needs someone else to control the TV for her as well as adjust the angle of her bed. We saw two distinct ideas to help her here, and based two of our ideas for the ideation portion of this project on these topics.

Having already been a part of this project last semester, Amy also came with an idea of an assistive device she would like. She likes to sleep with the blanket completely over her head and chest, but has difficult moving the blanket up and down since her arms have limited mobility and her hands are in an essentially fixed position near her hips. She wanted a device that would help move the blanket up and down by about a foot in each direction. While we obviously want to try and fulfill her wishes, we had some safety concerns about the project, so we tried to gather as much information as we could about how she slept and the typical blankets that she uses, particularly about the weight and material. One interesting thing to note is that when we asked if her bed had railings, Amy commented that she hates them but has one on the left side, but would be willing to add in the right railing if that meant she could move the blanket up and down. Although it seems like an important need for Amy, it may be outside the scope of our project at this current moment. It would be interesting, however, to design a device that could address the safety concerns and execute moving a soft material, even if it’s not for this project. 

Amy’s main type of blanket that she showed on the Zoom call. This would be hard to attach a device too to move in the first place, and is also a heavy blanket, which adds to the difficulty considering our current tools. She also stated she uses a duvet sometimes, which might have been easier to work with if we proceeded with this idea.

Amy also mentioned the “Environmental Control Unit.” Essentially, this was a device that enabled her to switch her lights on and off, control the temperature, turn on/off other devices around the house from a central system. However, since moving back to her parent’s home, there was no Unit that had been hooked up to the house, and she was lacking in many of the functionalities that were previously offered to her. There is a wide range of possibilities that we could address through a physical device when looking at what the Environmental Control Unit used to allow her to do. 

In another aspect, Amy also talked vividly about her past hobbies and things she wishes to go back to. For example, she used to work at StitchFix and enjoyed crafts, and wants to get back into writing. When asking about the tools she uses to transcribe words down and partake in these hobbies, we understood that there are applications she uses but they aren’t extremely compatible with surfing the web. To address this issues would require more of a software solution, but there could potentially be an assistive device in this realm, as well. However, our group decided to move forward with finding an assistive device for her daily life rather than her hobbies. 

Our notes from asking about Amy’s daily routine. Her attendant helps her with exercises since she doesn’t have the strength to do them all herself, but keeping her muscles mobile aids in keeping them flexible enough to move when getting dressed or lifted. l

Our Thoughts on the Meeting

• Reflecting on interview as a team, we consolidated the ideas we had discussed with Amy into three ideas we thought were the most viable:
  • The Blanket Adjustment System: This was the idea that Amy seemed to have the greatest need for the interview. However, we also recognized that although it could be very helpful, it would also be mechanically hard to implement and pose a major safety hazard. In our discussions of different methods to implement this idea we had to balance the factors of efficacy versus safety. While we came up with a few ideas for an emergency stop function (an analog button or voice activation), we ultimately decided there was no guarantee that either method could be truly foolproof. If we were to implement a solution, we would have to put in multiple types of emergency stops, and acknowledge that having the emergency stop go off too often is better than having it not go off at all. However, in a short project with relatively inexperienced students, there’s always a possibility that it malfunctions in a time of need. In a problem where a mistake in design or implementation could mean loss of life, the acceptable risk might be too high. However, at the same time, the benefit to Amy’s comfort, if implemented correctly, would be a huge boost to her quality of life.
  • A Environmental Control Unit (TV): The second idea we discussed was a controller for Amy’s TV that was optimized for her specific needs and use. Using her trackball mouse as a starting point, we started brainstorming different ways of providing a controller that was both easy to use and portable. Building off of the trackball idea, one idea we talked about was a joystick like or scroll wheel based mechanism. The main idea was to find a medium that required less fine-motor skill but also a high level of control as not being able to accurately control volume or channel designations can prove to be frustrating. Sketching out both the joystick and scroll wheel ideas, we also explored making the form more ergonomic to fit her use, whether that means playing with the grip of the joystick or providing a wrist rest that takes the burden off of her arms and shoulders. Further progress for this idea would require working closely with Amy to find out what the limits of her mobility and comfort entail and how we could make something she finds easy to move and use.
  • A Device Connected to the Lift on her bed: The final idea we had was to create a method of interfacing with the lift in her bed. Currently the bed is able to raise her head and upper body up and down, however, Amy is unable to interface with this system due to her limited mobility. The primary challenge could come from creating a system that she is able to control to a granular level that would interface with the existing system. The primary idea we discussed was potentially including a voice control element that allowed the interaction to be hand free and easier to use. A important factor we had to consider, however, was the ability for the original lift to still be operational through the existing interface without our new system preventing Amy’s helpers from accessing it.
• Other thoughts: 
  • As stated previously, our team seemed to collectively agree on addressing aspects of the Environmental Control Unit Amy mentioned, rather than going through the hobbies route. Though we never really discussed it, this route requires less semantics and more thought to address Amy’s specific restrictions. Initially, one group member though that certain ideas such as a remote to turn the TV on and off might be too simple, but after we started the ideation process, the physical restrictions imposed on the design proved to be significant and pose an interesting challenge to overcome. 
  • Another one of Amy’s problems is that in order to even use her laptop, her attendant must help Amy turn on her headphones, set the trackball at the right location for Amy to easily use, and set the laptop in front of Amy, among other intermediate steps. We considered making a device to allow Amy to set up her laptop by herself, but physically moving items (especially expensive, heavy ones) would prove difficult, and each step of the process to open her laptop would essentially require its own device. Just thinking about how to execute this one simply act that we do mindlessly made us further understand Amy’s limitations, and emphasizes the importance/utility of making something that may seem simple initially, such as a control for the lights or an adapted TV remote.