Lindsay Myer
Designer - Engineer - Entrepreneur
.png)
Motivation
15% of Elementary School children have trouble with fine motor skills, which affects everyday activities such as writing and eating. Because children facing this challenge do not have enough strength or control to perform tasks on their own, they are likely to lose independence and ultimately damage their wrists, which can lead to additional challenges in the future.
Understanding their Perspective
To create a solution that supported technical exercises that improve hand dexterity while understanding how to motivate kids, we needed to understand the perspective of children who not only struggle with fine-motor skills, but also actively attend therapy to build strength and dexterity.
Therefore, we interviewed an occupational therapist, and worked alongside them to observe the environment, activities and behavior of children in in therapy sessions. We then conducted A/B testing to gain feedback on our prototype, conducting usability testing with 7 children (ages 4-7) with developmental disabilities.
As a result of this research, we were able to identify gaps in tools currently used by therapists and test hypotheses on how to improve the therapy session experience and motivate kids with development disabilities to build dexterity.
Research and Feedback
Through our interviews with therapists, we discovered that the tools on the market do not directly guide children to practice the most important hand strengthening exercises- finger to finger and finger to palm.
While observing therapy sessions, we saw how often children get frustrated, physically tired, and bored with repeating their exercises. To motivate their students, we observed how therapists would play music to calm down and motivate kids through their sessions. So we began to explore how music therapy are used as an outlet to connect the exercise with emotion.
In addition to observation, we held a co-collaboration session with therapists and made the following insights that drove us throughout the journey:
Understanding
unlocks the power to improve coordination and strength
Partnership
between patient and therapist builds trust in the process
Inspiration
builds confidence to strengthen your body and mind together
Emotions
can be a child's super power or personal villain in therapy
Rapid Prototyping
We ideated and tested solutions validate hypotheses around product functionality by observing therapists use our prototypes to guide children through important exercises.
As a result of our research, we uncovered the importance of creating a tool that would provide active feedback to children. This led us to design a screen that gave the instructor the control to guide their students. For example, when a student completed a task, the instructor could trigger one music note and light on the screen.
After observing several sessions, we noticed that the children responded positively to visualizing a completed task, and the music note encouraged them to complete the entire exercise. However, the therapist had trouble controlling the screen and evaluating their student at the same time. Therefore, we needed to re-design our tool to better account for the needs of all participants during occupational therapy sessions.
Final Design
We created DigiGlove- an interactive glove that provides active feedback to the children. When completing their exercises, kids could directly see their progress and be rewarded with lights and sounds. Each finger has its own light and music note, so students could create their own song and reflect on how they were feeling. The instructors were able to direct their student by asking them to light a certain color. They even had the ability to turn off lights from certain fingers, so that the child could focus on specific problem areas.
We were able to test the final design with the students and their occupational therapist. After interviewing instructors who used our design, they noticed that with DigiGlove, the students were more engaged to complete their exercises and were having fun.
Future Directions
In the future we would like to do a controlled study with 20 children with difficulties with fine motor skills. We want to work with an occupational therapist over a few months to get more quantitative data on the glove.
-
Aesthetics for a more natural look and feel
-
Sizing to allow for various hand sizes
-
Interactive App to provide a game to encourage growth
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr. Samosky, The Art of Making Staff, Dr. Libertus, Mrs. Rossi, Mrs. Welling, and Mr. Schneider for their guidance.
DigiGlove was developed as part of the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering's course: ENGR 1716 The Art of Making: An Introduction to Hands-On System Design and Engineering.
