Author: tnovo298
Day 10
We had our final review today of both the patient project and the personal health project. It was very cool to see the different ways that each group presented their ideas for the patient project. Something that my group discovered during out presentation planning was that we could not figure out how to display our design process. Since our presentation needed to be visually based, we focused on thought maps and images. One of the group’s presentation stuck out to me particularly because they did an awesome job of showcasing their design process as a tree with a clear path from start to finish. They also included their decision making along with the aspects they chose not to pursue, which they explained in their presentation. I think this made it very clear what the thinking throughout their project was and encompassed all of the work and research that went into the project. Moving forward with my design projects, I want to use the different perspectives I saw today along with the panel’s feedback to help me with visualization and to overall build on my own design portfolio.
Day 8
I feel like I am really experiencing how human-centered design works. It’s very iterative based on the feedback and data collected. Today we met with our patient to go over the tests we did and our prototype. Our patient pointed out something to us that we did not think of because we are not visually impaired. Our device is currently using audio signals to notify the swimmer but audio is a very important sense for visually impaired patients to have. They use sounds to help orient themselves, especially in the water. To improve our design we will incorporate a vibration notification, rather than sound.
It was pretty cool to swim as a visually impaired person. I felt more in tune with my surroundings and more aware of my other senses. I could feel other swimmers passing in the lane next to me just by the small changes in waves. It was also very claustrophobic because without orientation, the water feels totally consuming. It felt like I was entrapped while being in the middle of nowhere at the same time. This experience definitely helped us understand the conditions of our patient better and allowed us to apply more specific criteria to our prototype.
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Day 5
Being visually impaired has physical disadvantages, which most people are aware of. You cannot see objects while walking, you cannot read, and you need help finding food at the grocery store. Something that I found particularly interesting the past few days while speaking with our patient is that visually impaired patients are heavily limited by their guides regarding general information. For example, our patient uses a technology called PenFriend which helps identify clothes and object around the house using voice recorded assistance with labels. Instead of buying expansion packs that are readily available on the Internet, our patient was buying new PenFriends which are much more expensive and made their life more tedious. The visual impairment made it extremely difficult to know the other options because navigating websites is more tedious when using voice commands. In this case, our patient was limited by the knowledge and resourcefulness of their helper or assistive technology.
Day 3
Today some of my group members met with our patient at the gym. We gained a lot of insight regarding the questions that have come up the past two days. It is clear that there are some areas of her life that she does not think are problematic that we find problematic. For instance, she is okay with walking on the left side of hallways whereas we find this quite uncomfortable. The more we get to know her, the easier it becomes to weed out certain topics that we considered for our project. The group members took nicely detailed notes about what she said and what she was doing. These observations are crucial to finding the problem we need to fix.
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Day 1
Today we started two big projects: one that is focused on a personal health goal and one that is focused on a patient’s problems. I worked with my classmate to figure out what health goal he wants to meet within the two weeks that we have class. The conversation went well because we were able to ask each other lots of questions. We decided that he needs longer and more restful sleep and he is, therefore, keeping a sleep log in order for me to figure out the magnitude of his problem before I can come up with a solution. We also met with our patient who is visually impaired. She spoke about her disease and daily life. I was humbled by how easy she made her days seem when in reality she has to go through much more effort to complete daily tasks than the average person. My group and I are getting to know her better this week by accompanying her during various activities such as walking to work, going to the gym, and playing with her dog. By seeing how our patient lives on a daily basis, we will find areas which could use improvement that she might not even be aware of.
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BME Design 