• Project development (individual)
  • Describe your partner
    • My partner is a cool boy who loves to play computer games and watches movies on the computer at home. 
  • What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?
    • He encounters the difficulties that when he plays computer games, he can’t play the game requiring both hands because his left hand could not move well. 
  • What is your project? 1 paragraph description + Pictures or Photos or Videos
    • Because the idea came up just recent days (As we moved the idea from the writing board to this, since that board is not the real need for him. We’d like to change to a new idea that could be realized within a short period of times). We right now only have a rough idea:
    • We’d like to propose a controller that could control by his right foot so that by substituting the left hand to the left foot, he can play games that require two hands. 
    • We want to use Arduino with 4 pressure sensors (to represent left/right/up/down) on a board to test it first.
    • Details would be provided after the test.

1.Describe your partner

Something new we discovered about our partner Lamb is that she is very warmhearted and participates in lots of public service activities. I saw in her mother’s Wechat moment that she donated five boxes of gifts to the blind people to try her best to cheer those who need help. 

2. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?

Lamb’s desire is to go out alone with her electronic wheelchair. If she go out by herself and it suddenly rain, it would get her into trouble since she can’t hold an umbrella by herself since she has to control her wheelchair and she can only use her right hand. 

3. What is your project?Development process. Include photos and video(s)

Our project would be an umbrella holder that Lamb can rotate by herself. We got the automatic umbrella and the umbrella holder that we bought on Taobao last week. When we tested the automatic umbrella, we found out that the umbrella exert a large force during the opening and closing process, which may be too dangerous for Lamb.

Also, once the umbrella is opened and closed once, the user has to pull it back to the original position to open it again. But it requires great strength to pull it back. It’s even difficult for me to pull it back. Therefore, we think it’s impossible for Lamb to pull it back by herself. This would cause lots of troubles, for example if she want to open it again, it would be hard. Another problem we encountered was that the joint of the holder for rotation is a little complicated, which may be too difficult for Lamb to rotate. We’ll try tomorrow to see if Lamb can rotate it and make it tight enough to hold the umbrella. If she can’t, Young gave us a suggestion that we can try to use a tripod as the joint, which may be easier to operate.

 

Therefore, for tomorrow, we need to let Lamb try if she is able to rotate and tight the joint and open the umbrella which is attached to the holder with one hand. We also need to measure the size of her wheelchair, the length of her arm, the distance that her hand can reach and her height when sitting on the wheelchair. These data are criticle to make sure our project is safe for Lamb.

a. Describe your partner
Throughout our conversation with him this time in class, we notice that he relies much on his mother about everything. When we are doing user testing of our prototype to him, he responded indirectly to his mother, and then his mother translates the sign language to us instead of trying to communicate directly to us. Most of the time, he is sitting and observing our communication with his mother as an observer. We then decide to have a conversation with him without his mother. In twenty minutes, we type in sentences on the computer and ask him to reply on paper. The conversation carries out very inefficient since it is hard for him to understand the grammar of a sentence. Therefore, we need to paraphrase a lot to confirm he understand our words. Also, he has limited capability of writing Chinese characters and link them into sentences. We spend much time guessing the meaning by applying body senses. After the conversation, we still think he has a strong inner desire to communicate and experience the outside world more. However, since his mother cares too much for him, it seems that he always wants his mother to help him overcome all the obstacles. Moreover, according to his mother, he likes to play computer games and watch online series at home when he is alone.

b. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?
When we are communicating with him, we notice that since he is used to relying on his mother so much, he is not comfortable communicating with us directly. He also has little language sense, especially for reading and writing. In our WeChat chat, his mother records and describes how he uses the computer to play games and watch TV series. However, he can hardly control the keyboard using his left hand. We categorize the desires/challenges/difficulties for him in the following points:

1. Relies too much on his mother
2. Lack of language senses to communicate with others
3. Want to build a romantic relationship
4. Computer sometimes crashes
5. Difficult to click the keyboard with the left hand while playing the game

c. What is your project? 1 paragraph description + Pictures or Photos or Videos
We abandon our previous idea after the first prototype and user testing since it could not engage him to communicate independently with others, as he says. Therefore, by checking his needs listed above, we think addressing no.5 will be most helpful for him. We are thinking about to build a special keyboard for him to press the key using his feet instead of his hands. For most of the game his mother lists in the group chat, they require the use of four keys to move the figure. Therefore, we may design a five-key keyboard with four direction keys and one function key. We also want the user to customize the key function to make it applicable to more situations.

d. Development process. Include photos and video(s)
This is the prototype for our first idea last week. We abandon this one later.

We have a conversation in the WeChat group. This is the website where he usually visits to play online games.

We then visit this website and plays for a while. Indeed, some games require using the left hand to press keys and the right hand to control the mouse.

We refer our idea to an interactive game Dance Dance Revolution. It demonstrates that feet are capable of controlling the game.

Since we get the information and ideate it a little late, we have not started to prepare materials. However, we do want to test his performance while using the regular keyboard to play games on the computer, and his sensibility of using his feet press the bottom.

My partner is a deaf Chinese male who also suffers from a left-side-slight paralysis. Indeed, he has troubles using his left hand and has a balance problem which is bettered by special shoes. He knows how to read and write in pinyin and in characters; although he sometimes has troubles with complicated characters. His vocabulary is also very simple and basic. But he can still communicate with his limited vocabulary.
He loves his computer so much and enjoys using it to watch movies, tv shows and video games. He knows how to use the computer well and he also knows how to navigate a dictionary (which he uses to look up characters he doesn’t get).
We thought of getting him a drawing pad which he can use to write down what he wants to say to people since he can’t talk and most people can’t sign. Since he has troubles with his left hand, to make using the pad easy, we thought of sticking it to a belt around his waist so that he doesn’t have to pull it out every time (and doesn’t have to use his left hand). We wanted to attach to the tablet a recorder in which we record in Chinese “I am deaf please write down what you want to tell me” for when he wants to let people know of his deafness when speaking to them.
Unfortunately, he’d much rather communicate through his mom and he is not very open to any other technology that can help him communicate with others. He is more comfortable with his mom doing everything for him. We have been trying to find something else that might help him but we still haven’t come up with anything as the only thing he enjoys is the computer (which he knows how to use except when it glitches; which is something we can’t control). We’ve been collecting lists of his games and pictures of him using his computer. But nothing has come out of that yet.