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Project Report

Our group made a project about how you could develop smart homes for impaired people. This is our finished report.

Reflection – The Future: Too crammed spaces

A lot of the things I have seen in this course that I think we should focus on in the future has a lot to do both with interaction, interface and information. In this case, I don’t see them as really different parts, and one thing I really have reacted to applies to all three.

The thing that really annoys me is when developers try to cram too much into a small space. Saving space is probably good when you don’t have much of it, but it really means that the thing will be much more difficult to user or understand. The most obvious example we saw was the stair climbing wheelchair which had a very crammed interface, but I think there can be many other examples.

The first thing I think developers really should think about is “do we really need all these options”? Probably not. I think that developers today tend to “get lost” in their own design, meaning that they try to implement everything at once, not thinking if it is really needed.

If the answer is that everything really is needed, then they need to figure out a good way to implement it so it would be understandable enough. I don’t really have a good suggestion to solve that problem, but I think their can be several really good ones.

Assignment 3 – Designing apartment for elderly

When designing for elderly, it is important to design so that the apartment can be usable both by those who have no impairments at all and those who have several more severe impairments. I think that the most tricky part is to make the apartment general, so that you don’t have to redesign too much it if the person living gets an impairment because of age or accidents.
I will write my suggestions from the view of different impairments (and parts of the apartment) instead of different ages, since aging isn’t the same for two people, and thus we cannot really address the age, but have to address the impairments instead. There are impairments that are are more common with aging, and this is why I think this is proper.
The apartment as a whole
One of the most important things when designing the apartment as a whole is to avoid level differences as far as possible. I will only consider one story apartments. But those apartments could still have level differences, sometimes one or two small steps are used when it is needed for some reason, like uneven ground, or just as a design feature. Avoiding all these small steps are easily avoided.
Another thing that can be easily avoided are doorsteps. Doorsteps today are mostly used as a tool to avoid air moving under doors, and to close out sound. But there are other ways to solve those problems. Doorsteps could be a big problem if you have a wheelchair or a walker. I see no problem avoid these right from the start.
Doors in general could be designed to help both elderly in general and impaired people. First of all, doors could be wider than the usual standard. This way, it could be much easier to pass with a wheelchair if needed. And some illnesses and impairments needs frequent visits to hospital and/or visits by medical personnel. If the tenant is immobilized in a bed due to an impairment, the bed could also be moved through the wider doors and medical personnel could move stretchers and other equipment much easier.
I also think that space is an important issue in the apartment as a whole. No matter which room you are in, there needs to be more space to move around. If you are in a wheelchair or are using a walker, you have to have space to move these around. And as I stated before there are some impairments that are quite common for elderly, which raises the need for wheelchairs or walkers.
The kitchen
The kitchen is one of the most important rooms when it comes to designing this apartment. This is probably the room in a home where you does the most physical work, like cooking, cleaning the dishes and things like that. In here there could be some heavy lifting and using both knives and pans that could be hot.
The stove could be really hard to manage when you have different impairments. You often have really heavy pans or pots and if the stove is fixed at a certain height it could be really hard for someone in a wheelchair to reach and lift those things. If you lower all the work benches, including the stove, it could be very hard if you aren’t in a wheelchair, but have problems bending due to some impairment. One solution is to have a stove that you can raise or lower using some easy controls. This way the stove can be adapted to the current user. This is particularly good if there are more than one person living in the apartment and one of the persons is in a wheelchair, but some of the other(s) not.
The oven basically has the same problems as the stove. In my kitchen the oven and the stove are built as one unit. This doesn’t work with my solution, they have to be separated, something which is already possible today. I suggest putting the oven (possibly a combined oven / microwave oven) in a tall cabinet – something that most kitchens have. Using some elevator function, the oven could slide up and down in the cabinet, just as the stove. You could also make the oven hatch open at the side instead of at the bottom. This way you could get much closer to the oven when you are inserting or withdrawing something to the oven.
Another thing that could be really tricky in the kitchen is storage. If you are in a wheelchair you will have a huge problem reaching things at shelves or cabinets high up. The solution here is to have everything in the lower cabinets. The problem I see with this is that someone who has problems bending could also have problems picking up heavy things in the lower cabinets. I would say that it isn’t practical to have every cabinet and shelf vertically movable, so I would suggest making the cabinets so that you can put the heavier objects in the higher shelves of the cabinets, and the lighter things further down.
The work benches and the sink also have to be considered. I really don’t have any good solutions here. Maybe the sink could be movable as the stove and oven, but as I said, it would probably be very impractical to have too many things movable. The work benches could probably be built a little bit lower than the normal standard, but not too much.
I don’t think that the dining table and the chairs have to be altered, more than that you have to have sufficient space to be able to move a wheelchair or walker around them.
The bathroom
Another room where it is essential that it is working properly for everyone is the bathroom. There are several things in a bathroom that have to work with several impairments.
The most important I think is the toilet chair. When you design the handles for a toilet chair for a home, you might not want them to look like a chair in a public toilet for impaired. But I think you can use it as a start, and then try to design it to look much nicer than they look in a public toilet. You could actually hide it in the wall behind a “hidden” door, and push a button to fold them out.
The other thing that could be an issue, specially if you get some impairment that makes you having problems moving is the shower or the bathtub. I have been thinking about this a lot but I haven’t really figured out a good solution. The best I have been able to think about is having a lowered bathtub, something which I have seen being more and more popular in “regular” homes. The other solution could be to build some nice looking steps up to the bathtub, which would give the same effect. The step solution could also be helpful to people in wheelchairs. They could use the steps to sit on when they are moving themselves up and down from the bathtub.
The bedroom
The last room that is more specific is the bedroom. The fist thing I thought about are good looking beds that could be raised up to a sitting position. I saw the hospital ones that we had on the slide that you could boy, and a really agree that they really don’t look very nice. I also know that my parents, who have no impairments, have bought beds at IKEA with most of the same functions that those hospital beds have.
Building drawers instead of high lockers could also help a lot. There is still the same problems with this that I mentioned when I came to the kitchen. Too low would maybe cause more problems, but too high is often a problem, no matter what.
Other rooms
Since other rooms does not have a specific function like the ones above, I think it’s harder to design them. Of course we have to think about space and possibility to move wheelchairs and walkers around, but in my opinion, in other rooms that depends more on who the tenants chose to furnish them. If we design them too much and tells them “this is how it’s going to be”, I think it would feel very patronizing to them.
Conclusion
Of course there is much here that is left out and that may not work for everybody. My focus here has been flexibility by excluding as few as possible. And in every home there is a possibility for two (or more) people to live, and those people may have different impairments that limit their physical movements in different – maybe opposite – ways.
I think that problems reaching and lifting could be the largest problems when you get older and impairments could increase those problems further. I have tried to address these problems as much as possible without making the home harder to navigate and/or learn. Therefore I implemented thinks that could move in height, to make it easier to reach on top or inside them, no matter your position.
The other problem I have addressed is moving around in the apartment. My solution here was adding space so that you could move around with any aids you may meed.
There are problems that could be more common among elderly, such as for example bad eyesight and bad memory that I haven’t addressed much in this text. Bad eyesight, I think is mostly included in the above solutions, like taking away doorsteps. Also, bad eyesight is nothing that really limits the ability to move, for me it is more a matter of helping the person learn where everything is in the apartment. Bad memory is also something that I think can be designed away. My suggestion is to remove complicated technical solutions. All my solutions above can be made so simple that they can be very easily remembered.
I have intentionally left out conditions that need specific solutions. The task was to design a home that you could grow old in. It is my belief that if you add everything for every impairment and condition that you can think about, the home would be both overly complicated to live in, and not very desirable. If you move into the home at the age 70, and you have no impairments, you would probably not want a home that has a lot of solutions to different impairments that you don’t have. Therefore I have focused on the solutions that could be helpful for both healthy people and those with more common impairments that could still be severe.
But! I think that you could hide a lot of possibilities inside the walls, floors or roofs. If the tenant needs a lift above the bed or the bathtub, there should be preparations made so that it can be installed very easy. By preparing the apartment for different possibilities that you might not install from the beginning, you can easily address impairments when they occur.

Reflection – Usability vs. User Experience

One of the questions that we had to reflect about was “What is the difference between User Experience Evaluation and Usability Evaluation?”.

I believe the usability evaluation deals with if the product is usable or not. A really good example could be a regular wheelchair. When we evaluate usability, we can ask ourselves questions like “Can the user drive it forward?”, “Will it tip over?” and questions like that. The usability evaluation I would say is much more straight forward, and you can measure the answer easier. The example questions I stated can easily be measured in some way.

When it comes to user experience evaluation, we enter much foggier ground. User experience deals with how the user feels about using the product. Here, I think the questions are much harder to determine, and often they cannot be answered (and measured) by a simple yes or no. In one way you can say that this is also much more important. A product could have very good usability, but if the experience is bad the customer won’t use it (if we don’t force it in him/her by not giving other options). Our wheelchair could be usable as intended, but if the person using doesn’t feel safe using it, or if he/she thinks it looks really bad, she probably don’t want to use it if there are other, better, options.

Reflection – 4-wheeler as an impairment aid

I reflected some about about the 4-wheeler we drove during the lecture. It was very good in many ways, but I could still see problems with it.

The first and most obvious problem was the foot brake. If you are paralyzed from the waist down, you will not be able to use it at all. I’m not sure what the difference with the two handbrakes and the footbrake so I’m not sure what impact it would be removing it totally. But you needed to push the footbrake when switching from forward to reverse and back. Also the two handbrakes could be very hard using if the strength in your hands are affected.

The steering was also very sluggish, and you had use the whole body to steer, specially in low speeds.

One solution could be to implement a joystick similar to the one in an electric wheelchair. There are several thing that could be gained from this. Combined with power steering and electric break support you could get the exact same functions as with the normal controls. The problem with the joystick is that increasing speeds makes it both harder to use and more dangerous. Maybe you could be able to choose how high the top speed should be while using the joystick.

If the wheels were further apart than on the 4-wheeler that we tried, the stability may increase, but I’m not sure what that would do for such things as ground clearance, maybe that would have to be increased. I also thought about some kind of seat belt, but I’m not sure about how good that would be if you actually roll over.

Reflection – Lecture 9

The coolest thing I think we saw in the 9:th lecture was the motorcycle. I think that is really trying to go out of the box to make something really usable for someone that can’t use the normal “toys”. The really good thing is that the motorcycle looks really good. Of course it could be stigmatizing in a way that everyone sees that it isn’t a normal motorcycle, but the step from there to saying that it is a motorcycle for impaired people is much further here I think.

Therefore it is a really good example how to make things for impaired people but still try to keep the stigmatizing factor as low as possible.

The other video I really liked is the iBOT wheelchair. Of course, anyone would still see that it is a wheelchair, but making it look nice, and also add functionality, really raises the coolness factor in my opinion. The added functionality also makes the wheelchair more usable than a normal wheelchair, and the raised usability is really good too.

The other example is the other wheelchair where the user could “stand up”. This is an example where you add functionality, but the added functionality doesn’t raise the usability as much, both because it may look strange and raise the stigmatizing factor (because of several things – the slowness of the raising function, the user feeling naked etc) and because it could feel really unsafe.

Of course the iBOT could also feel unsafe, but when it comes to myself, I would probably feel more safe in this than the stand up chair. But maybe that’s just me.

ATM:s and visual impairment

I thought a lot about the ATM-machine seen in the video. I think there are several solutions to the problem. One solution, which I mentioned in an earlyer blog post is yet again standardization. Edison had a real problem finding the hole where hole would put the plug for his earphones. If the position of the hole were standardized to, lets say, the lower right corner, the problem would be much smaller. Other things like the position of the buttons, could also be standardized to help him.

Another thing I noticed was that he tried to withdraw too much the first time. A simple voice saying “You want to withdraw X dollars and Y cents, to confirm, press enter” would help very much in this case. Now he have to guess that he has gotten the correct amount of money.

Another solution could be to implement a speaker that gives the instructions whenever you press any button without inserting the bank card first. This way, the machine could either tell the user where to put the headphones or just give all the instructions through the speaker. I think that due to stigmatization, this would only be a complement to the written instructions that were shown in the video. This way the user would have possibility to choose how to use the system.

Pincilpes and practices: Elevated sidewalks

The thing that I thought about a lot in the last lecture was the thing about the elevated sidewalks. I never actually thought about how the elevation was there to help people not having to walk in the mud. I always thought of that as a safety measure, so that the pedestrians would be more shielded from the cars. The more I thought about this, the more I realised that 15 or 20 cm elevation wouldn’t shield that much from a speeding car.

So I thought about a solution to this. How can we redesign the sidewalks so that we esclude as few as possible, and maintain safety at the same time.

The first solution would be to just lower the sidewalks to the same level as the street and paint a line that cars wouldn’t be allowed to cross. This is a beginning of a solution but far from a complete one. It would actually be more dangerous ´since blind people (or drunk and many other) would have a much harder time staying on the sidewalk.

I think a good solution would be to add a (nicely designed) metal railing, or even concrete barrier, with opening where you are allowed to cross. This would solve a lot of problems, specially safety issues with visually impaired or drunk people straying from the sidewalks, cars going onto the sidewalks, and even the most common problem, people crossing streets at the wrong places.

Tools and how to make them

One of the things that I really thouight about during the lecture were how to make tools that everyone can use, not just impaired people. The remote control is one of the best examples on that. It is something that was, if I understood it right, originally developed for people who couldn’t get to the tv easily, but it became something that everyone uses. I would never buy a tv without it today.

Or the things that were just designed to be a good thing, but turned out to be even better for people with impairments, like the thermos mug.

I think that the important reason for designing for everybody is that it lowers stimatization, which will make the product much more desired do use. If we as designers would want to get customers, we have to make a product that is desirable.

Of course some tools are very hard to design for everybody, like wheelchairs. But you can design it som it looks good. Another of thing I thought about were the person wearing the supporting weakness tool at the gym. That tool is designed to look very similar to a lot of support that “normal” people wear at gyms, so it wouldn’t stick out, and other people wouldn’t probable even notice it. That is good design.

Why ethics are important

I think the most important thing from the lecture is keeping the personal space and respecting an individual. When using ethics in any research, we have unwritten rules about what is ethical and what is not. We can use many of these ethical rules when we work with impaired people, but we may also have to add rules, and that is important.

I also really liked the part about the saviour syndrome. I think that the absolutely most important questions to ask when we try to fix something that unimpaired people may think is broken, is the following: Is it really broken? If it is, do we really need to fix it? If we fix it, whom will it benefit? Should we impose our fix on everyone?

We should really consider these questions, and I also think we should ask these questions to our intended target group. If we do this, we will probably learn that we will get all kinds of answers from the target group. If we use the glasses example that we talked about in class, some people will definitely answer that they would like to have the laser correction, but other will say that they will prefer not to have it.

There is another very important thing to learn from this. If someone does not want to have our “perfect fix” it doesn’t mean that he is stupid.