Post 4: Sketch and storyboard

Interview with Dr. Muayad Aziz

1. Organizing things

• He thinks that the biggest challenge for visually impaired people is organizing the stuff. They often rely on remembering the exact location of items and expect everything to be returned to the same spot after use. However, if someone else uses an item and puts it back in a different place, it becomes difficult for the original user to find it again. In such cases, a human assistant has to return the items to their original location.

• He also mentioned that sometimes visually impaired people have a hard time opening the container.

• He says organizing the kitchen is also challenging. He thinks it would be good to have a robot that can do dishwashing(even a sketch cannot do it) or place the dish on the table.

-> Currently, human assistants help them to organize the kitchen.

2. Clothes

• About clothes, he says it would be good to have a robot that can distinguish the color of the clothes. 

-> Currently, they use a sticker to distinguish the color.

3. Plugging

• He said that visually impaired people can plug in their own electronic devices without assistance. He thinks it might be useful to help plug them in, but he didn't think it was that big of a deal. 

-> When there are multiple plugs in, they use texture to distinguish them.

• Visually impaired people usually distinguish objects using texture or weight.

• His sister is visually impaired and he asked her if she could meet with us in person to give us user feedback.

• Kitchen organize robot

Our next direction:
- We're moving on to kitchen organize robot. We plan to have Stretch help with sorting and organizing basic kitch utensils such as forks, knives, and spoons. And we're exploring what other objects it can help with that are likely to be too dangerous for visually imparied people to touch directly such as hot plates or pots.