The Legs Guardians Mid-term Updates – Developing Assistive Tech: Fall 2021

Mid-term Updates

Transcript:

Aaron:
Hello everyone. Welcome to our status update this semester, Yihan, Jane Nafl and I are working with Milagros Franco, our community member, to work on some of her ideas.

After some soul searching and philosophical debate, we realized that this semester our design mission is to protect legs. Yes, you heard it right. We’re creating a design that will protect Milagros’s legs. And so with Milagros collectively we call ourselves The Legs Guardians.

But before your mind wanders off. Let me help you focus with an agenda of tonight.

Tonight, Yihan will tell you more about our marketing analysis. Nafl will fill you in on the important meeting when we all became Legs Guardians. And finally, Jane will share our plan of attack. But to start, let me introduce you to Milagros.

Milagros is a social worker, but she’s full of design ideas. After meeting with her and given that we have limited time, we decided to work on this one thing, called the Tammy Mat.

Well, who is Tammy and why does Tammy need a mat?

Tammy is Milagros’s cat, Milagros uses a wheelchair and Tammy likes to spend time on her lap. Every time Tammy jumps onto Milagros’s lap, her claws just dig into her legs. Here is a quote from Milagros.

“I love her, but she’s drawing blood out of me every day.”

Well, certainly a complicated relationship in a bloody situation. But Milagros came up with an idea, she calls it the Tammy Mat. In a nutshell, it is a piece of fabric Milagros can wear around her waist so that when Tammy jumps on her, her claws cannot get to her leg.

So yes, together with Milagros, we are here to protect legs, not just her legs, but all legs of all cat owners. But before we took this important mission, we did some marketing research on Milagros’s , other ideas and I’ll pass it onto Yihan to talk about them.

Yihan:
Yeah, so before we decided on moving forward with Tammy mat, we actually did a market analysis on a variety of ideas that Milagros proposed. And we’re going to have a quick look at each one of them to see how we arrived, where we at.

So the first one, Milagros propose is something of a Milli Picker Upper, which is something that can help her to get up when she falls by herself. So we looked at a variety of lift systems. For example, this Hoyer lift ranges from $700 of $5,000. And the inflatable elk or camel lift as pictured here, can take anywhere between $1,600 to $10,000. These are extremely expensive devices. And alternative, integrated service such as a fall detection from Apple Watch that triggers an on-demand service network, might actually be a better and more affordable idea, that’s not mechanical.

And let’s move on to the beach towel. So Milagros wants a towel for her wheelchair that prevents it from getting wet when she get out of the shower. So we first looked at an assortment of waterproof materials. For example, there’s mattress encasement. But we stumbled upon this product, called AbleDry, which has a water absorbing upper and a waterproof inner on the wheelchair side, so it almost fulfills all the need that Milagros was asking. It also supports both electric high back chairs and manual low back chairs, as well as a variety of colors.

Alternatively, we also looked at the Alcantara fabric, which is waterproof, high-performance and gives a luxurious feel. But we think the AbleDry, It’s pretty much, solves a lot of Milagros’s problems already.

So next, we looked at the steps that she mentioned so this ParaLadder is $1,000, as well as this ResQUp, apparently is the more affordable option among the two and is $400.

And for dressing sticks, most of the US based dressing sticks ranges from $10 to $20. Imported ones from China are much, much cheaper for a variety of use cases. But another answer could be adaptive clothing, which is clothing that optimizes for limited mobility, specifically for wheelchair use as well that makes clothes that designs those are easier to put on when you’re laying down or in the chair. One product is MagnaReady. which are magnetic buttons that aren’t really buttons, so you don’t need to button and unbutton.

And lastly is the Tammy Mat. So we were looking at that are weighted blanket as a starting point, you know, because it’s, it’s quite a thick material. But we anticipated some concerns regarding heat dissipation and temperature regulation if she were to have it on for an extended period of time. So we also looked at waterproof under pads and these are some very early explorations.

So overall, the takeaways are, I think the price difference between oversea and us assistive products are quite interesting. We might dig a little more behind the reason. For that. And I think it also really makes us think that alternative ways to solve the same problem is very important to provide customized solution as well as avoid paying, the assistive technology premium in the US.

And now with all these are analysis that we’ve done. I’m going to hand it over to Nafl to talk about the first meeting with our Milagros.

Nafl:
We met with Milagros last week and discussed which device she is most interested in. Tammy Matt was her preference since it’s the most urgent one, it appeared that her cat, Tammy’s jumping onto her lap to get to the table and to other surfaces all over the house which resulted in bruises caused by the cat claws all over her lap and knee and her upper legs.

Two main ideas were proposed. First, Barber’s cape that she can wear and tie around her back and cover the front area of her lap along the way to her upper legs using a hook and glue made from velcro products for fastening. A pro of this idea is that it will be more stabilized, but the cons are, it might be difficult to take off when transferring to bed or toilet and donning and doffing acquire some strength and could be hard to perform.

Second, stabilize the cape or mats on the wheelchair itself and use a magnet fastening. A pro for this solution is easy, donning and doffing and transfer. The cons is we are not sure of how the magnet would react with the electric wheelchair since the wheelchair has a battery. And now Jane is taking over to talk about our next steps.

Jane:
So far we have less than seven weeks to finish our project. to make sure we can finish it on time in an efficient way here is the plan for the following weeks.

Step 1 ideation and interview from week 8 to week 9, we’re going to come up with as many solutions as possible, go and clarify the ways of using them and then interview with Milagros. Find the pros and cons of each design solution. And by summing up the valuable ideas, we will decide the final plan. The key of the solution may be the use of materials, structures, shape, and how to wear it.

Step 2, design development. From week 9 to week 10, we will focus on the more specific things such as size, height, and details of the design.

Step 3 research. Week 10 or 11, we will look at the existing products and see how they use materials and structures. And consider how can we purchase and use those things.

Step 4, prototype making, from week 11 to week 12, we will make prototypes with relatively cheap materials. And we will show it to Milagros and see how she reacts to them, then make some adjustments based on her suggestions.

Step 5, fabrication. In the last two weeks, we’re going to use the tools and equipments from Maker Space to do the fabrication. We will try to make the final work look like a real product.

Finally, this project will not just be made by the four of us Milagros is the most important member of our team, we will keep in touch with her to listen to her needs and make sure that we are really solving her problems. Hoping this presentation are able to clarify what we’re going to do and what we plan to create. And thank you for listening.