Through our research process, different scopes of people with temporary mobility challenges have been considered including recovery tracking, social activity, and navigation. By doing different types of user research such as contextual inquiry, diary study, user enactment, and QOC analysis, we chose to set our scope on helping the user’s recovery from the injury. In addition, a holistic approach using the activity tracker and the connected scheduler will collect data needed to assist the recovery.

Throughout the studies, users indicated several goals and values they want to achieve by using assistive technology. The most important goal is to recover as quickly as possible. To this end, they wanted the device to be directly helpful for the recovery. It will be better if they can record and browse their recovery information. Also, they mentioned that they want to save the effort and time of going to the clinic because it is hard for them to travel between their homes and the hospital. Another user value was about the social aspect of being injured. They wanted to be able to share their injury status with others, though at the same time they were also concerned with protecting their privacy. Getting help from others would facilitate their participation in social activities and avoid the alienation from friends and family that sometimes results from mobility injuries. Finally, the system should not be obtrusive in the living environment. We can therefore summarize the values provided by the system as follows: practicality, visibility, convenience, efficiency, sharable, social improvement, and unobtrusiveness.

Study Design

For our formative study, we applied a mixed approach to collect data from patients and providers, including 2 observation, 7 key informant interviews, and 2 diary studies. Our participants, including students who were currently or previously injured, were recruited from University of Michigan hospital, Student Health Services, and personal acquaintences. Data collection focused on potential user behaviors, as well as the experiences that impacted their emotional state and social lives. For more details of our diary study, interviews, and field observations, please see Milestone 2.

Analysis & Key Findings

After the formative study, we re-wrote all the interview notes and diary entries and cut them into note cards for further analysis. Then, we built an empathy map and grouped the notes into key themes to help us understand user motivations, emotions, and other factors that influenced their behaviors.

The key themes we identified include:

Physical/Environmental obstacles. Participants identified a number of challenges around navigating their environments, including staircases and uneven or slippery grounds. The lack of accessibility in building entrances and other facilities also makes coming and going strenuous and time-consuming.

Flexibility of time management. Despite being injured, participants strove to return to their normal work and school schedules. However, simple movements had become painful and time-consuming. Users reported frustration over the additional time and effort, as well as the planning involved in arriving on time.

Self-image. Users reported a general frustration over their inability to perform everyday tasks as efficiently as they had been able to do prior to their injuries. This comes from both comparing themselves to the healthy people or to their former selves and causes negative emotions over time.

Social interaction. Users reported social isolation in workplaces, as well as a considerable reduction in their ability to participate in social events due to the mobility inconveniences. Participants also reported conflicting needs to be perceived as competent and independent, while sometimes also needing additional help.

Communication with physicians. Most of the communication between users and their doctors takes place in face-to-face settings. There is no mechanism to enable continuous communication regarding the patient’s recovery process. The length of the recovery cycle also appears to be frustrating for patients.

For more details on our empathy map, affinity wall and analysis, please check Milestone 2.

Study Results

We combined the affinity wall methodologies to further organize the data as well as discover design opportunities and constraints. We summarized opportunities in our design space into key values that could be conveyed by our product:

Self-esteem. it is important for users to move past the frustration and see their injury as another facet in their life, albeit a cumbersome one. Therefore, we considered aesthetic in our design in order to help people to deal with discrimination and stereotypes from society, and view their injury in at a less negative light.

Visibility. The lack of visibility in the recovery process became a major cause of anxiety, and physicians reported a potential need for increased information on patient recovery to avoid additional injury. Hence, we believe it is necessary to improve the visibility of recovery process through our design for the sake of both doctors and patients.

Flexibility. Study results showed that despite the assistance from mobility devices, participants still felt frustrated about the limited activity ranges, inflexible time schedules, and lack of accessibility supports. Therefore, we hope to provide solutions which allow patients a greater range of motion in daily life.

Social support. Our design will attempt to relieve the social interaction issues arising with the mobility inconveniences, such as reduction in social events participation, and the contradiction between the need of getting help and desire for independence.

Peace of mind. As one general solution to reduce users’ worries and frustrations of all kinds, our group wants to convey the sense of peace and calmness from our design to its context of use, seamlessly embedding our design into users daily routine without obtrusive interactions.

At the same time, we identified several constraints as follow:

It is essential that our design finds it place within the current medical system in order to have a meaningful impact on our users.

Our solution must be closely related to the context where the users are confronted with mobility problems. This might include the physical surroundings, specific kinds of obstacles, and certain crowds of people they are interacting with.

Our solutions for visibility and transparency of recovery data need to be in balanced with privacy concerns.

Our design should be easy to use, easy to learn, and should deliver information services efficiently in consideration of the physical limitations.

Limited time and human resources.

Based on the study results, we ideated more concrete features, adding more socially supportive element in our design. Afterward, we selected and integrated most useful features into three refined concepts to convey the values we discussed above.

Concept 1: Transparent on demand crutches

To meet these conflicting and context-sensitive needs to hide and publicize injuries, we chose to develop a transparent and transformable type of crutch. Users can turn on the LEDs on the surface of the crutch when they need help or to alert other people of their condition, and change back to the transparent mode when they prefer to hide the injuries.

Concept 2: Recovery tracking system

This is a remote interaction tool between physician and patients to be used in recovery stages. It helps users record their pain levels, do recovery exercises, and retrieve previously stored health data.

Concept 3: Environment Detector

This concept is designed to help the user save time navigating a new environment. We decided on a gesture-controlled smart glass as the navigation system, which would identify obstacles, such as staircases, slippery floors, or crowds. For more details of the description and scenario of each concept, please check Milestone 2.

First, users input their destination on the smartphone application. The input data will be delivered through voice recognition technology since it is difficult for visually impaired people to utilize a touch screen to type words into their phone. Then, by using map data, the application suggests a recommended route including both pedestrian paths and transportation transits. While walking on the pedestrian walkaways, the user can use his or her own white cane in two ways. Firstly, as usual, users can rely on his or her cane to avoid immediate obstacles in the way, for which application guidance cannot be provide forewarning. The user follows braille roadblocks with his or her white cane.

As it follows the braille roadblocks, the cane will operate the second function; hitting braille roadblocks with this newly designed cane, an RFID reader at the tip of the cane reads location information from RFID chips in roadblocks. Then, the white cane sends location information to a smartphone.

When a user has to be informed of the exact direction or has to make a turn at the corner, vibration motors in the handgrip tell users which direction to go, and how many degrees to turn. Along with vibration, the user’s smartphone tells a few types of necessary information to the user with voice: landmarks, the ends of each block, crosswalks, and corners. Due to the process, users can find where they are and thus do not feel astray.

At the bus stop, the user waits for the right bus. When the user arrives at the bus stop and tags the RFID chip with the white cane, a notification is sent to the bus driver.

When the bus arrives, it will make an audio signal from the front door so that the blinded person can recognize distance and direction to the door.

The unique contribution of TalkingCane is to combine shared public data with a white cane to improve traveling experience of the visually impaired without introducing additional gadgets. Our objective is to help visually impaired people take buses easily by increasing accessibility. We conducted a literature review to find visually impaired people’s difficulties in taking buses.

During the review, we discovered the need for communication technology between visually impaired users and the world for a better traveling experience. To establish the communication, a white cane and braille roadblocks were chosen as new interactive devices. Many of our target user groups already use them in their daily lives. The white cane was a great device to apply haptic feedback for terrain obstacles and become an RFID reader as communication equipment.