Assistive Technology Week 6 Assignments #1 by You (Ian) Xu

Describe your partner:

       My partner is very quiet. When I first took a glimpse at him, I did not identify anything abnormal about him. He walks a little unbalanced, but that does not make him look strange. We started to ask questions and introduces ourselves to him. He seemed to have understood our words but only replies in limited voice and hand gestures. None of us understood it. Therefore, we found a pen and a piece of paper writing down our conversation. He writes comparatively slow, but the characters are clear to understand. After that, we had a long conversation with his mother. While we are chatting with his mother, I noticed that he is quietly listening and paying attention to our conversation. Later, his mother posted some questions on the paper, and he started writing the response. He even actively started writing a sentence to us while he is a little ignored by us. Therefore, I believed that he has a strong desire to join our conversation. However, the way to communicate is a big challenge for him.

       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.

What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?

He has many challenges. Throughout our conversation with his mother, we noticed that he never goes out by himself but also with his mother because of the potential dangers on the road. Since he lacks a certain degree of the ability to control the left side of his body, it is very hard for him to keep the balance. Also, he expressed his desire to have a romantic relationship with his mother two years ago, but his situation is not socially accepted. Furthermore, his mother is also concerned about his safety at home since he might open the room door for strangers. However, after all, we nearly forget that our target audience should be himself instead of his mother. We were chatting with his mother all the time instead of him. We then realized the most significant difficulty for him is the inconvenient environment of his communication with others. We could hardly communicate with him until his mother came.

       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

What is your project?

       At first, we intend to build a portable writing pad attached to his body so that he can easily communicate with others by writing everything down on it while going outside. However, we abandon this 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 fingers. For most of the games his mother lists in the group chat, they require the use of four keys: “W,” “A,” “S,” and “D” to move the figure. Therefore, we design a four-key keyboard with four direction keys. The keyboard should be on the ground so that he can step on it. We also want the user to customize the key function to make it applicable to more situations.

Development process.

       We first think about using joystick bottom. However, he may easily break it by stepping on the bottom too often. We then search online and find a pedal that connects to the computer as a key. We then come up with the idea to apply four pedals and build a four-key keyboard.

pedal

We first write in the key information for every pedal and label them accordingly. Now, these four pedals can work together as a special four-key keyboard. Since for some games, he may need to press two bottoms together, the problem is how to position them best? We open some online games and use only the right hand and right foot to try playing them. We adjust the position of the four pedals according to our experience interacting with it to find the possible best layout. Please refer to Yanru’s blog for the videos of this processing. Finally, we think the photo below shows the best layout. We also need to build a higher platform in the middle to place the feet if no pressing needed.

layout of pedals

Due to the late delivery and time conflict, we have not had the chance to go to his home and test with him directly. We will arrange our time later to collect feedback from him and install it on his computer at home.

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