Shopper Sense

The Team

The people on our team are Aaron, Hollister, Emma, Allie, and Graham. Each team member was part of the design and planning team. Team members were assigned roles to keep us on track: Aaron was the president, Hollister was the vice president, Emma was the slides editor, Allie was the secretary, and Graham was a production manager. Shopper Sense was a whole team effort. Even though we disagreed sometimes, we all learned that teamwork makes the dream work.

First Things First

We came up with a shopping sensor for the I.D.X. competition. It is called Shopper Sense. The shopping sensor can help blind or sight-impaired people while they are shopping in a grocery store. You need to have headphones for it to work. First, you clip the sensor onto your cart and connect your phone to the system using Bluetooth. Then, you slide your phone into the slot of the shopping sensor and it automatically charges it while helping you shop. This device alerts you to the aisle you are shopping and the basic items available in that aisle. When you walk past something that is on your shopping list then it alerts you through your headphones.

Brainstorming

When we began to brainstorm, we all had different ideas. Some of the ideas we came up to help the blind and sight-impaired were a shower-head, a braille pen, a braille map, a 3-D picture book and the shopping sensor. While researching we found out that most of the things we came up with already existed and we didn’t know how to improve them. When we all voted, the shopper sensor got 4 votes and the shower-head got 1.

Our cardboard prototype looks like a briefcase with an antenna on top. The antenna was a pipe cleaner and it was 1 and ¾ inches long (This was later removed).

The Design / Prototype

The boxes dimensions were 6 in. x 7 ½ in. The handle itself was 3 inches high. On the left side of the front of the prototype was a sensor. (In the final product the sensors were moved).

On the prototype the two buttons were located to the right of the sensor. One of the buttons was the ‘off’ button and the other was the ‘on’ button.

Iterations

When we started to print, we had multiple iterations. The majority of our iterations were misprints that took up a lot of our time. Halfway through our design we realized that we needed to cut our design in half to be able to fit on the print bed. Due to the fact we had to split our design, we had to assemble all of the pieces to make our final product.

The Final Product

Our final product came out to be a basic box with a handle on the top. There are buttons on the top of the device on both sides of the handle to power it on and off. The on and off is printed in braille. There is a slot for your phone to go in that automatically charges it while working. There are sensors on the sides and back. The size of our iteration made it so our prints were really long. As you can see in the picture, half of the main device took almost ten hours to print. This made it difficult to watch the printer so we could diagnose any problems.

Feedback and Future Iterations

Feedback that we received on our final product was mostly good. Other teachers at our school liked the idea and the components of our design. Some also thought that we could change a few things. One thing they suggested is a more travel friendly design. Another teacher wondered if we could make it look more modern and less boxy. In the future we would like to integrate those ideas into our design for mass production to the sight impaired public. We would also like to see this type of technology go viral in our society to serve the people who need it.