Assignment 3 – Designing a flat for elderly

As days pass by we are all getting older. With science and medicine it looks like the average duration of life is getting higher and higher. That is why we need to think about how we want to live and why it is good to design for the elderly.  As the personal help for elderly is getting worse because of the costs it is good to design a home that makes it easier to live on your own.

I have two grand mothers, one who live in a home for elderly with personal help and one who lives at home by her self. There are big differences in these places, and I have thought about what is good and bad about them and tried to design my own home.

I will write about every room in a flat for elderly, but something that goes for all of the rooms is that there are big doors and windows and a lot of space to move around if you are in a wheelchair or use a walker. The flat is not separated in rooms, but are just one big room with different areas. Only the bathroom is a different room. The room is on the same level everywhere and to be able to leave the flat there is a big elevator outside the room that is easy to get in and out of. To access the flat no key is required to remove the struggle of fitting the key inside the keyhole. Instead, it is just a chip that needs to be placed onto a surface and the door opens.

The light switches today are to small so these would be replaced with big buttons that are placed strategically around the flat. One by the bed that controls the light for the whole flat so you do not have to get out of bed if you have forgotten to turn the light off.

A schedule should be connected to the flat that reminds the user of dates and times. With a big screen and big text that says what is next on the schedule. Things like meeting friends and family as well as time for dinner or medicine.

The hall

This part of the room is where you enter. There is a place where you can put you shoes and your jacket. To get the shoes off easily there is a spot where you put one of your feet and the shoe gets sucked onto the device and the foot can easily be lifted off the shoe. There is also space to put the outside walker and switch to an inside walker which has smaller smother wheels.

The kitchen

In the kitchen there is often a lot of stuff high up or down low. This kitchen has the most used stuff in the height of the hip, to minimize the strain on the back. For example, the dishwasher should be easily accessed without having to bend over the reach the dishes. Some older people have problem with memory and that could be dangerous in the kitchen. The stove will have a timer connected that needs to be set to be able to turn it on. In this way there is no worry if the stove is left on. The sink has sensors that turn on the water when moving a hand in front of it. There are a lot of sharp tools in the kitchen, if you don’t have steady hands it is not a good idea to use knives that are heavy, but to hold the knives there is a magnet that keep the knives accessible at the right height. The fridge should be able to sense if the food has gone bad and have recommendations on the front of it.

 

The TV

It is very common that when you are getting old you spend a lot of time in front of the TV. The TV shows that are the most popular ones are the shows from other countries because they are subtitled. It is hard to hear what they are saying so it is easier just to read. The Swedish shows are not subtitled because they are in Swedish. It is possible to turn on the subtitles, but it is a difficult process for some. In this flat the TV has an easy accessible button on the remote that turns on the subtitles for any TV show.  There should also be wireless headphones available because it can be hard to hear what they are saying and you do not want to disturb the whole area.

The bed

The bed is an important part of the flat. It should be able to move up and down and tilt up to support reading in bed. To prevent stigmatization the bed is not suppose to look like a hospital bed, but have the same functionality.

 The bathroom

The bathroom is an important, if not the most important, part of the flat. It can be hard sometimes to keep yourself clean and get every part of the body clean when showering. A special chair is placed in the shower so you don’t have to stand up for a long time. This chair have cleaning abilities which help out during the shower process, cleaning the lower part of the body, while the top of the body gets cleaned the regular way.

Conclusion

 There are many things to consider when it comes to the elderly and it is easy to make assumptions of what is best for them.  It is good to have ideas that can be tried out. To do it right the elderly has to be involved in some way.  But there are many elderly people and it is not right to put them in the same category. The flat should be able to customize to every persons need and taste, but the basic could be the same.

Lecture 11 – Reflection, Towards the future

When designing interfaces for the future it is important to not take the shortcuts to make a fast and cheap solution. It could be very tempting, but it is much more difficult to fix the solution afterwards than to make it right from the beginning. The technology is getting more and more advanced and that makes it even more important (and difficult) to make a good interface. A good interface is where you take away the unnecessary information and let the computer take more and more decisions on its own.

As I mentioned earlier the computers are going to have more and more control over our devices, that is why it is very important to teach the computers to do it the right way. Make complicated decision that seem natural for the user and not the opposite. Be able to customize the settings to adapt to the right need and impairments will be very important just as important as having adapted the interaction to different cultures.

I think it is more important to design for as many as possible instead of designing for just one purpose. In that way tools and solutions get cheaper and is more motivating for companies. It is hard to say how the future is going to look like, maybe robots will be the next personal assistant, but it is easy to forget that the most important thing for humans is being social and socially accepted. We cannot forget about what the needs are before finding solutions.

Lecture 10 – Reflection, User Experience Evaluation

User experience and usability are two very important topics that companies tend to forget about. Especially when it comes to aid for impaired people. Usability is about efficiency, is the interaction efficient then it is usable. But is usability enough to develop a good product? How important is the user experience? Is it worth the time and money to think about experience? It is very important, but it tends to be pushed aside sometimes.

User experience is a about feelings and emotion, which can be very hard to measure. Usability is a little easier because tests to measure efficiency and effectiveness is just about time different assigned tasks. But how do you measure emotion? I do not think a person could easily describe what they are feeling when interacting with a device.

User experience in universal design would be a great thing. If a person feels great his emotions will reflect on people around and it will lower the stigmatization and the feeling of being less valued that can occur in many situations. The evaluation should be about what a person is missing and what could make it better.

Blind man group – NavsMart

Requirements

The solutions should satisfy these prerequisites:

• Intuitive interface.

• Easy to use by visually impaired people and by people without an impairment.

• Normalizing (non stigmatizing)

• The solution should facilitate shopping task.

• Help the user to locate and distinguish groceries in the store.

• Guide the user in an efficient way through the store.

Solution

The solution that meets these requirements and solves the problem is an application. Since the solution is an application in a small device that is easy to carry along, that makes the application non stigmatizing. In this application there will be an intuitive interface for both visually impaired and people without any visual impairment. This is acquired by offering an interface that can be communicated with via touch, and also by voice commands. For the application to be able to tell the user the location of the desired groceries and the best route to pick them up, the user has to at some point make a shopping list that the application can use. The application should be able to retrieve changes to this shopping list at any time during the shopping activity if the user decides to add or skip items. The user should be able to distinguish between the different brands of each product and also get important information about the product.

The technological requirements for this idea is that the grocery stores will have to install some WiFi-hotspots throughout the store. This will not be a big issue for the grocery stores since some of them already have free WiFi for their customers, and the idea of free WiFi is much appreciated by the general public as well. These will be used to obtain an indoor navigation system by measuring distances between different routers in the store. For obtaining even better indoor navigation the stores will need to install Bluetooth-transmitters in the floor at intersections between shelves, so that the user can get information on how far ahead an intersection will be, and therefore be certain that he or she enters the correct aisle given by the system.

There are parts of the solution to make it easier for visually impaired already out there. These products are good but not complete and there are several things that need to be improved. Now a few some examples of products that are available for visually impaired.

ShopTalk

This is a solution that helps the customer finding the product inside the supermarket. It is a kit consisting of a barcode-scanner and a navigation tool that is attached on the back of the customer. There are a few problems here and the first thing that is most noticeable is the backpack. It is the tool that guides the person around the supermarket and is something that is needed for the system to work. Does a visually impaired person want to wear a backpack to expose himself that he is different. Stigmatization is a big problem and this solution does not take that away. To identify the product, a scanner is used to scan the barcode on the right shelf. This requires that the barcode is easy to find or else it could be very frustrating and time consuming.

oMoby – Shopping app for blind

oMoby is an application that helps identifying an object just by scanning an image of a product. This is a lot better than the previous solution where a barcode was necessary to find out the current product. It does not have the need precision because a picture of the whole product is only needed. This is not a application that guides the customer around the supermarket, so the person have to know where to find everything. In the video he mentions that sometimes when he knows that a person is around he prefers to ask what kind of product he is holding because it is easier, but it can be exhausting to always rely on another person.

Ica Handla – Shopping app

Ica Handla is a app to store and sort a shopping list according to the chosen store. It is a good way to plan the route around in the store. This application, on the other hand, does not have support for the visually impaired. This also requires that the user needs to know what to shop for before arriving to the store.

The application would suit best for a smartphone since a smartphone has a lot of the functionality that is desired. Smartphones are used by many people that will be able to utilize the application and therefore visually impaired people would be less likely to feel stigmatized.

The user makes a shopping list within the application. When the user steps into a grocery store the application will automatically sort this shopping list in the order the items are placed within this particular store and calculate an optimal route for picking up all of the items. If the user wants to skip an item on the route, he or she tells the application to ‘skip’, and it will move on to the next item on the list and guide the user there instead. A similar solution is used if the user wants to add an item to the list while on the route to an item in the store. In that case the user tells the application that he or she wants to ‘add’ and item, and says or types in the name of that item. The application will then sort this item into it’s appropriate place within the shopping list and add it to the route in real-time.

When the user arrives at the right position for a product in the store, the user uses the camera function and takes a photo of the product. The application informs the user about the product, what it is. The user easily choose the get more information about the product such as price, table of contents, nutritional facts, origin, allergy information and other certifications.

Reflections

For our solution to work some cooperation from the grocery stores are needed. First and foremost they need to equip their stores with WiFi-routers and Bluetooth-transmitters. Secondly they also need to maintain a pretty static schema of where the items are placed in the store, this schema also need to be updated by the employees of the store if they get a new product, if a product is removed or just moved to another shelf. We believe that most stores already have some kind of database where information about their items are stored, but if they don’t this is something that they will need to implement for our idea to work. The stores also need to install some kind of sensor at the entrance so that the application can be notified that the user steps into a store, and also which store it is.

There might also be some issues where the user has a problem aiming the camera correctly towards the product, but we feel that it still is a lot easier than to find a barcode to scan. As a visually impaired person it could prove quite difficult to find the barcode on a product, but if you already have the product in your hand it would not be so hard to point the camera towards that product.

We would also want to be able to from the picture of the item get information about the expiration date, since this information is connected to that particular item and therefore not general enough to be stored in the database.

We also had a phone interview with a visually impaired man named Fredrik Larsson. He told us what he thought of our idea and also recommended some extra functionality that he felt would be appreciated. For example he missed having the ability to find out what kind of products the store had to offer, and also he wanted to know what special offers there currently were, three for the price of two etc. He also told us that some visually impaired people used a regular buttoned cellphone and some used smartphones. Another thing he recommended was that the application should have a function so that it could warn the user if he or she shops for more money than they have left on their card (the card that is connected, ica-card).

Of course this is going to be useful for people without an impairment as well, especially when it is a store you have not been to before.

 Group: Conny Anderson, Mikael Svärdström and Jonatan Moritz

Wheelchair day, reflection

I have never experienced being carried by a wheelchair before. This day was going to be something special. First off was a regular wheelchair indoors. It was not hard to maneuver and it was kind of nice and comfortable. But my posture was terrible and I felt something strange inside, when I passed people in the corridor most people were looking down on me and I felt even worse.  The electric wheelchair was fun, what made it more fun must have been the speed, the faster you go the more fun it is. Still, my posture were different and I had to really try to look cool in it.

Polacksbacken is poorly adapted to regular and electric wheelchairs, it was really exhausting. The biggest struggle was trying to get into the building because of the placement of the button and the time the door was open.

If I compare the wheelchairs with the four-wheeler we tried out in the end I would say I felt a lot “cooler” on the four-wheeler than in a wheelchair. It is not very adapted for impaired, but it could be. If you transfer the foot break to the hand the function of the feet is not necessary. One problem is the support for the back and legs. Something that could press you against a backrest but not something that is big as a chair. One thing that I notices as well was the height, an option to lower the four-wheeler to get up on it would ease the struggle.

Reflections, iBot

I liked the idea with iBot. One of the biggest disadvantages of being placed in a wheelchair is that you are immediately half the length of everyone else. It seems like every one is looking down one you as if you were less valued than the rest. This solution is heading in the right direction, but it is still not all the way there. When it was in “Standing mode” it seemed as it lost a lot of speed and mobility which, of course, probably is for safety. But if you take a look at Segway, I have tried one of those, they are really fast. So a combination between iBot and Segway would make it more useful and make it less stigmatizing for disabled.

There is also of course the design. It does not look very “cool” and, in standing position, you are still sitting. What if there was a way to make the person in half standing position. Maybe it is to hard and to much of a struggle for the impaired, but it would lower the stigmatization, because then a person could communicate in the same height and get the idea of how tall the impaired person is.

Parkinson’s spoon

Just a little clip I found on the web. It’s suppose to make it easier to use a spoon when dealing with Parkinson’s syndrome. A simple but great idea!

Lecture 8 – Reflections, ATM and the blind

This is a reflection of a video called How Blind People Use The ATM by Tommy Edison. Tommy is demonstrating how difficult it could be to make a withdrawal on a ATM.

At first he reads the instructions with his fingertips that tells him to plug in his headphones. This is where the first mistake is made. As he mentions the instructions does not say where to plug them in he has to feel around and find it. A simple improvement here would be just to have the headphone jack right below the written instructions.

Another issue was that he had problems to withdraw the right amount of money. Tommy said he was used to type in the amount in dollars and in cents, but it was not the case on this ATM. If there existed shortcuts to the top five most common amount on a withdrawal he could have been given those options and chosen one with a touch on the keypad. If he does not find the amount he was looking for he could still have the option to withdraw the amount he wants. To solve this the voice should tell him the amount instead of the number when he touches the keypad.

It is not so hard to do some small changes to make it so much easier for a blind person you just have to think in a different way.

Reflection – Lecture 7, Principles and Practices

I like the idea of “designing products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design” because this does not only improve the production costs, because there is a possibility for mass production, but lowers the stigmatization for impaired people. Step three in the process of universal design(by Sheryl Burgstahler), involve the costumer, is one important step, if not the most important. It is important because they are the end user and if you are not involving them in the process, it is probably not going to be very successful.

Reading the principles in Maximizing Usability (by Molly Follette) I realized that design guidelines are a good start in developing universal products because they are based on user tests and evaluations on similar product. The biggest obstacle must be changing the attitude against impair people, but to move towards that goal we need to develop the right products that does not stigmatize the user, just then, can we move forward.

A product does not only have to be developed for impaired. It is possible to create something that “normal” people can use as well. A good product would be something that improved both impaired and other peoples every day life.

 

Reflection – Lecture 6, Needs and supportive tools

It is hard to decide wether a simple solution or more sophisticated technology is needed as a supportive tool. If a tool, that is cheap, can help a person with a minor problem, like reaching for a sock on the floor, instead of having a robot picking the sock up from the floor, which would cost a lot more to develop, would be better. You will have to identify the need and try to find a simple and good solution before you try to think of a complicated and expensive one.

The risks with a low tech solution is that it could be to low tech and not give enough aid. It is hard to produce something simple and at the same time aid in a difficult task. At the same time there are risks with a high tech solution. It could be too hard to use if it is a bad interface. If it is a bad interface you could do the wrong things in different situations that could end up, in worst case, hurting yourself or someone else.