Romibo Robot Project
Concept: Romibo is a pet-like social robot designed for therapy, education and fun!
The Romibo Robot Project is a collaboration between robotics researchers and people like YOU in the user community. Together we are co-developing a therapeutic robot for children with physical and developmental disabilities. Romibo’s educational and fun features support robot therapy research while providing tandem value to the general public. Building Romibo and contributing your ideas and experiences will help to improve the lives of others.
Tags: assistive technology, build, collaboration, conceptualize, design, design research, developer, director, entrepreneur, inventor, social robotics
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 3:05pm
MEmote, final project for Making Things Interactive
Concept: Note: this project has now developed into Romibo. Please visit www.Romibo.org to learn more!
MEmote is an affective mobile robot designed to discover potential benefits to children with mental and physical disabilities. (The project is a preliminary exploration executed over the course of two weeks and will continue to be developed and researched).
Design: MEmote aims to harness the tendency of rot memory mimicry (typically of commercials or TV characters) and an affinity for mechanisms to suggest a model of behavior and means of emotional communication through "scripting" to the child. The robot will express it’s level of excitement on a continium from calm to over excited while “playing” such as chasing a ball. As the robot becomes more “excited” it will become more animated through gesture and light, until it becomes “too animated” and removes its self from the excitement to calm down. The robot will make therapist-controlled “scripted” statements in conjunction with its state and behavior, ranging from “Nice and calm,” to “Too much!… Time to relax.” Potentially the robot may be able to impress a mapping of behavior to language with which to model and articulate action and emotion.
Role: Creator/Inventor
Tags: build, collaboration, conceptualize, design, developer, director, inventor, research, researcher
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 3:24pm
HelloCoffee, independent Study Physical Computing and Robotics
Concept: A coffeepot that uses affective display to covey task status and state.
Design: HelloCoffee was designed to react to the user as a sort of cheerful servant, similar to a faithful dog or loyal pet. The more attention recieved, the more it reacts. When the button is pushed, the coffee goes into brew mode. The lid closes, the eyes open wide, and the LEDs turn on. Once the coffee is done brewing the LEDs turn off and the eyes are wide open. As the coffee cools the eyes lower. Wide-open eyes mean fresh coffee; closed eyes mean old cold coffee. Designing affective behaviors into products may increase user understanding. Emotion may help ease user frustrations in cases where they cannot see or hear what the problem is, instead affective display will let them know to be patient and understanding, much to the same affect of a sick pet.
Role: Conceptualized, designed, built and programmed robot as an independent project.
Tags: build, collaboration, conceptualize, design, research, social robotics
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 2:48pm
Fear of Bugs, exhibit designed for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Concept: A traveling walk-through specimen exhibit that collapses for shipping.
Design: I worked with two graphic designers to develop an exhibit for the Invertebrate Zoology department at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The exhibit was designed to be light-weight and modular yet durable. The specimens slide out of the exhibit to be transported separately. Each section worked in tandem or stood alone providing the opportunity to send as few or as many sections of the exhibit as required.
Role: Conducted user research, developed flat-pack concept, designed and built interactive scale prototype of exhibit.
Tags: collaboration, design, prototyping
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 2:37pm
Pediluma
Concept: Personal-Public Displays - a class of devices that presents actionable personal information not only to the user, but also to the public, including friends, family, colleagues, neighbors and even strangers. Six properties are outlined that we believe are important for such information displays to embody. These build on two well-established methods for inducing behavior change: presenting pertinent information at the point-of-decision and leveraging social influence. To investigate the effectiveness of our concept, we have chosen a popular, but challenging target: motivating physical activity. This led to the development of Pediluma, a shoe accessory that tracks and visualizes the wearer’s physical activity by varying the intensity of a lighted housing. Results from a two-week, seventeen-participant user study indicated people wearing our device significantly increased their physical activity.
Role: Conducted real-world user study of participants wearing a pedometer-like device that reflected the environmental impact of their physical activities. Assisted in the design of the study, designed and fabricated wearable devices, conducted setup and all intro and exit interviews.
Tags: build, collaboration, design, design research, graduate research, HCI, research
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 2:38pm
Firefly – Ambient Displays
Concept: Advances in electronics have brought the promise of wearable computers to near reality. Such systems can offer a highly personal and mobile information and communication infrastructure. Previous research has investigated where wearable computers can be located on the human body – critical for successful development and acceptance. However, for a location to be truly useful, it needs to not only be accessible for interaction, socially acceptable, comfortable and sufficiently stable for electronics, but also effective at conveying information. In this paper, we describe a study that evaluated reaction time performance to visual stimuli at seven different body locations. Results indicate numerous, statistically significant differences in the reaction time performance characteristics of these locations. We believe our findings can be used to inform the design and placement of future wearable computing applications and systems.
Role: Lead real-world user studies of participants doing work in a library and measured reaction time to peripheral visual display devices in array on the body.
Tags: build, collaboration, design research, developer, HCI, prototyping, research
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 2:39pm
Sensemaking and Robots
Concept: Robots are complex and difficult to understand. It is important to take particular precautions in the design process to avoid rejection, confusion, discomfort and other ill effects. We advocate sensemaking as a holistic solution to the design of human-robot interaction. We describe sensemaking and enumerate a series of interface variables that can be applied to HRI. We explore one of the most important aspects, robotic motion, and apply this framework in the domain of motion. Our results indicate that the design of motion may not be as important as the design of form and or appearance for this particular robot platform
Role: Designed and conducted lab studies on human perception of a robot’s task status when the robot is outfitted with an on-board affective/ associated display.
Tags: design research, graduate research, HCI, research, social robotics
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 2:35pm
StepGreen
Concept: An interactive system utilizing online and personal electronic media to leverage virtual social networks to build a personalized system to educate and influence decisions related to energy consumption and the reduction of one’s ecological footprint.
Role: Conducted initial word association studies, card sorts, in-home ethnographic studies, created a comprehensive report and provided design direction.
Tags: design, ethnography, sustainability
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Last Updated: 2011/11/02 9:48am
WaterSoK
Concept: This is a project I did on bushfire safety and prevention while studying abroad in Australia. While in use it's a huge life-saving reservoir for water to fight bush fires. However, when not in use it will roll to the size of a sleeping bag.
Design: This is an extra water source meant to be prepared in advance during a bush fire threat. In the event that the fire does reach the home this water reserve can be used with a common Davey pump to wet down property and to put out small spot fires.
Role: Design and sketches.
Tags: design, illustration, sustainability
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 2:36pm
Acculturation Technologies
Concept: We are interested in developing technology to aid in the blight of families divided by distance. We look at the case of Latino immigrants as an example of cultural and emotional dependence on their friends and family abroad. Our goal is to aid in the acculturation process of immigrant families in the United States. We have identified overlapping points of interest in acculturation, technology on the fringe, and the immigration of Latinos. Though both a pilot study and our ongoing work we illustrate our findings. Our findings to date have shown two things: first that use of technology is proportional to the level of adjustment in their new home in the United States, and second we show how there are several different segments of this population with diverse characteristics. Being that face-to-face contact is at a minimum, technology becomes even more important to build and maintain one’s social network in these new growth areas. The Pittsburgh area is a new growth area for Latino immigrants, which means that the population is so spread out that they do not have a community to turn to. We are looking at immigrants’ adaptation to their new environment by appropriating technologies to maintain, build and extend their social networks as they work toward citizenship or whatever their chosen goal may be. We are interested in understanding how technology might be developed to help immigrants’ adjustment to their new lives in the United States. We present a model for designing technology for this audience.
Role: Conducting in-home ethnographic studies on how Latino immigrants in a new growth area utilize technologies to build, maintain and extend their social networks and support their acculturation process.
Tags: design research, ethnography, graduate research, research
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Last Updated: 2012/01/15 2:36pm