Guillaume Thomann

Seventeen Projects Carried out by Students Designing for and with Disabled Children: Identifying Designers' Difficulties during the Whole Design Process

ABSTRACT This article aims to identify the difficulties that may arise when designing assistive devices for disabled children. Seventeen design projects involving disabled children, engineering students, and special schools were analysed. A content analysis of the design reports was performed. For this purpose, a coding scheme was built based on a review of the literature. This was then improved through direct observation of the design reports. The coding scheme includes 17 categories, 7 of which stemmed from the direct observation of the reports: these 7 categories cover newly identified difficulties. Three important aspects emerged from the content analysis: (1) Difficulties identified in the literature arose in the context of this study. (2) Among the difficulties related to the practical barriers of involving disabled children, one new difficulty in particular was identified through the study, that is, that of partnering with special schools. (3) While existing literature focuses on the practical barriers, the results of this study show that not all difficulties are related to these barriers. In fact, understanding user needs proves to be especially difficult when the product to be designed targets several different disabled users.

Design of a Clip Product Based on Customer Needs for Playing Acoustic Music

Inclusion of uses and users in product design remains a challenge to take up; especially when their characterizations are very specific (it’s the case with disabled persons). In the musical domain, a lot of adapted interfaces are manufactured to enable users with disabilities to play music from digital audio. But few of them allow the music practice on acoustic instruments, which is one of the goal identified by the AE2M non-profit association (Ergonomic Adaptation of the Musical Material). In this specific context, this paper presents the design of a universal product which transforms any user environment object to a personalized interface, to play percussion instruments.

How 3D printing technologies can contribute into an iterative design process? Case study to hit a drum for Disabled Children

In the Assistive Technology area and design for disability, users must be taken into account during the design process. Multidisciplinary design team is constituted and an adapted design methodology used. In this design case study, this team has to develop an electromechanical drumstick dedicated to percussion instruments. Objective is to allow Disabled Children to hit a drum using an automated drumstick. Authors proposed to used of available Rapid Prototyping (RP) Technologies all along the design process. Different RP technologies were manipulated by engineerins and engineering students to be able to validate progressively product functions and news ideas and designs. The results indicates that one RP technology can be chosen in correlation with a new iteration of the design methodology. The availability of RP technologies helps the multidisciplinary team to validate progressively the product according to requirements. This experiment contributes to the development of different prototypes over the years.

Designing for physically disabled users: benefits from human motion capture – a case study

Abstract Purpose: The present study aimed to improve the design of an interface that may help disabled children to play a musical instrument. The main point is to integrate human motion capture in the design process. Method: The participant performed 20 pointing movements toward four selected locations. A three one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed in order to determine the most efficient input location. For each button position, we compared (1) the reaction time (RT), (2) the movement time (MT), and (3) the spatial variability of the movements. Results: According to the results obtained for RT and MT, one position was the most efficient button location in order to produce efficient movements. Conclusions: As the case study showed, combining the 3D motion capture system and the statistical analysis led to help the designers their design methodology and crucial choices. Implications for Rehabilitation The paper point out the possibility for designers to use motion capture science to improve the efficiency of the personal interface manipulation to play musical instrument. This experiment with the disabled user allows researcher not only to propose standard procedure to characterize an interface but also to take into account the complete behaviour of the user: from the decision of the movement to the execution of the action. The discussion and the experiment with the disabled user help him to better understand its own difficulties. This kind of experimental procedure helps a lot the user in his future rehabilitation choices and decisions.

Use of Kinect Tool to Measure the Physical Capabilities of Patients for Wolf Motor Function Test in Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Grenoble (CHU)

This study was performed in the G-SCOP Research laboratory in collaboration with Grenoble University Hospital Center (CHU) in France. The objective is to develop a tool for the automatic evaluation of motor skills of patients in clinical settings. The proposed method takes place in the context of medical activities carried out daily at this Hospital. Our study was in physiotherapy department to standardize the assessment phases of motor skills using Microsoft Kinect sensor. In our research, physiotherapists proposed to work on the WMFT (The Wolf Motor Function Test) measurement protocol which is recognized and used regularly for patient evaluation. In the first stage, it is tried to understand the protocol together with required elements. Then, a Kinect tool is prepared for the model which can be able to connect two points: the combination of the Wolf Motor Function Test (WMFT) with the Kinect output. Our initial experimental results of testing on both patients and 10 healthy persons in the G-SCOP laboratory showed the capability of the tool to measure the activities of the WMFT protocol. Furthermore, the results of this study can be the bases of future researches for the use of the Kinect in this domain and implementation of this tool directly in the Grenoble hospital.