Research
Journal Papers Used During Research:
This article discusses universal design with respect to disabilities. It argues that building devices with assistive technology in mind for people with disabilities ends up creating products that make everyday tasks easier for everyone. Many products require the use of relatively find hand and finger movements. The project done here by MIT involves a user that has reduced hand dexterity. The traditional hand, with its 4 fingers and 1 opposable thumb is usually needed to use many products and devices today. The thumb is important in the actions of pinch gripping and power gripping.
The author states that “The optimal shape for an object that a user turns with a pinch grip is a long strip that provides room for the thumb and fingers to grab either side of it. A spherical shape like a doorknob, on the other hand, is the hardest to grip because fingers can slip on the surface.” We must take these design considerations into account.
For power gripping, it is important that we allow as much contact area between the hand that the object being gripped. The author points to levers and other similar object being the easiest to grip, while objects that allow less of the hand to be used are understandably more difficult to grip. This means that one of the major problems for us to solve is how to increase this contact surface for different kinds of object, and different sizes especially.
The paper goes into solutions for assistive technologies in this path of thinking, and mostly covers already existing solutions.
This article talks about user experiences with assistive technologies, but not directly. It is actually about the parents autistic children who use them. They talk about the main question they want to answer by stating, "Using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) within the parental expectancy-value theory framework, this study will investigate the following research question: How do parents of autistic children make sense of their experiences with assistive technology?.” This article has valuable insight because it's not just the users who are important, but the people around them as well.
The findings of this study show that the parents generally believe that the technologies are helpful, they don't think that they are too necessary. The parents were fond of the technology in the sense that it allowed their children to socialize with other people better and communicate as well. They were less likely to use the assistive technology for things such as entertainment or academic reasons.
This information can greatly help us as we search for problem based solutions.
This paper talks about the effects of assistive technologies on the hands of their users over time. The paper mainly focuses on the effects of technologies that help to increase grip strength and helps difficulties in mobility on the postures of their users. The highlights of their finding are as follows:
Assistive devices reduce the use of precision grasps in the right hand by 31.9%.
Assistive devices increase palm contact by 26% and 29.1% in right and left hands.
Some devices increase shoulder flexion, elbow pronation and wrist deviation.
Tasks studies include opening cans and bottles and therefore relate with our goals. Generally, the assistive devices reduced the contacts of the thumb and index fingers on the surface of the object being used, but increased it for the other fingers. The authors note that “the results obtained from the video analysis show less neutral postures of the arm in the tasks with fewer precision grasps and more power ones. These results may be explained by the use of less neutral arm postures to compensate for the lack of precision of the power grasps.“ The bottle and can openers were found to produce interesting results on both the bottles and cans moving the right elbow, wrist and shoulder, moving them away from the normal positions during use. This could be an important insight, because we have to consider the effects of our device to the user.
This article talks about the pop top cans and the problems they bring to older people. The article first discusses why they are a problem to older people. They state that “Reduction of pinch grip strength and an increase in pain sensitivity are the two types of deterioration. Pinch grip strength involves the ability to grasp objects between the thumb and distal ends of the fingers,” and they show how this deteriorates with age. This is important to our problem because it helps narrow down the types of the people who need the assistive device and helps us find the types of people to design for.
The paper also goes into detail about the types of can opening mechanisms that people of different generations enjoy. Here the authors write “The elderly, however, preferred to use a simple opening device to transfer the movement away from the fingers to the wrist. Because of the reduction of precision movements, the elderly preferred to use the J-popper opening device. “
This article gives us insight into the types of problems that people have with opening cans or other similar objects.
This article talks about how engineering teams can better understand and implement a philosophy of user centered design. They specifically focus on the design of assistive devices. The approach they used “was seen to yield substantial results both in terms of physical adaption to existing problems and solutions, but furthermore it provided unique and often surprising insights into solution identification from the perspective of actual service and system users.” The insight that this paper provides could be very useful to us when designing our product.
Organizations Using 3D Printed Solutions for Creating Assistive Devices
https://www.easterseals.com/our-programs/easterseals-uses-3d-printing.html - a nonprofit dedicated to helping people with disabilities, veterans, and the elderly.
https://www.access3dservices.com/ - nonprofit dedicated to exploring 3d printed solutions to help people with disabilities. The firm does engineering, design, 3D printing, CNC services, and 3D scanning.
https://www.makersmakingchange.com/ - charity which leverages a community of volunteers including engineers and therapists to help people with disabilities. They also employ alot of 3d printing and HCD. https://www.makersmakingchange.com/tag/3d-printing/