Interactive Accessory for 3D-Printed Prosthetic Hands
The interactive accessory for 3D-printed prosthetic hands is a new approach to support 5-12 years old children with limb deficiency in a part of social and emotional problems they face including starting interactions. The piano glove is a type of wearable device in form of sleeve or glove that provides sounds and visual effect with gesture interaction to support children’s playing activities such as playing musical instruments, and encouraging exercise.
The purpose of this project is to design an interactive device to respond to the needs of children who are missing part of their hand and/or arm and can use a 3D-printed prosthetic-like device.
Most challenges that the children with limb reduction face are about social aspect and based on the challenges we established four design goals; (1) Enhancing social interaction, (2) Increasing users’ self confidence, (3) Muscle development and encourage activities, and (4) Supporting playful activities.
Enhancing social interaction: To respond to a part of social and emotional problems children with prosthetics are dealing with, we are aiming to support them in activities they might struggle with or need more support for. These activities include facilitating learning, supporting play, replacing physical hand gestures with interactive displays, and enhancing parent-child bonding and friendship.
Increase users’ self-confidence: Another goal we are following with our design concept is to help prosthetic user children to feel confident. To achieve this goal, we want the prosthetic to be more than a replacement for functionalities lust due to limb reduction. Instead, we decided on a set of features that are interesting for children in our target age range and are not available in a natural hand. These features are supposed to help the user feel empowered because his/her prosthetic is giving them some abilities more than what a natural hand could provide.
Muscle development, encourage activities: Our third goal is to motivate a more active lifestyle to support muscle building in the reduced organ and help with prosthetic adaptation. We are going to reach this goal by some motivating content to encourage the user to perform suitable moves while wearing the prosthetic.
Playful activities: Finally, one of the problems we learned about both in our needfinding and precedent studies was users giving up the prosthetic use as they feel more comfortable without it. When lots of current research in the field are focusing on wearability and interaction aspects in response to this problem, We consider gamifying as a possible parallel solution to focus on.
The piano glove prototype provides an opportunity to play a musical instrument, to the children who are unable to play actual instruments. The major feature of the prototype is to make piano tones by sensing different colors. In addition, an RGB LED display’s color is being sensed by the prototype. There are two different ways to play the piano with the piano glove. First, the children can play the piano with a colorful paper piano keyboard, this is similar to actually playing the piano. Another way is to use any physical object for playing the piano instead of the colorful keyboard.
“If the glove teaches me how to play the piano with a voice, it would be great.”
In our user study, the children (3 limb reduction children and 10 normal children) were satisfied with the overall features and the concept of the design. The preliminary evaluation for identifying usability and engagement issues showed uncovered usability issues, interest in the prototypes, satisfaction with the prototypes, preferred features, and design changes that future design should address. To be specific, the most common critical issues are easy attachment, kids-friendly appearance, the accuracy of the prototype, and child-centered gesture design.