Oh the progress we’ve made By: LBanda

Tomorrow our major deliverable is due and I feel that it actually helped my teammate and I to organize ourselves and know exactly what we want to do next. I feel that we have been making great progress. This time around we have been more focused on prototyping and testing rather than researching. Our goal is create a remote control that is made from conductive dough. The dough was made with simple kitchen food items that one can get from any grocery store at a very cheap price.

We previously attempted to use molding clay as the remote, but it was hard and therefore would be difficult to mold to different people’s hands. Since people with arthritis can potentially have their fingers positioned a certain way we want the remote to be adaptable to their hands instead of the person having to adapt to the remote shape. The grip of the remote will be made of the dough, but it won’t be conductive therefore it won’t activate the makey makey by simply grabbing it. On the remote we want to create the keys from the conductive dough that we made. The keys will be placed according to where the person places their fingers. Those keys will control the up, down, right, and left keys. We plan on creating another remote with the same structure and materials, instead this time it will only contain the space bar and the left mouse click. We hope that with this design, the person will experience less pain in their joints with tapping a soft doughy surface then clicking the hard keyboard keys.

We plan to showcase our prototype in the Make-o-Rama to test it with the student body. Since the students are from ages 11-18 we can test all sorts of hand sizes and see how effective the dough is to adapting to those sizes. This will be of course connected to the Makey Makey in order to play pacman. With this game, we can also test how effective the keys actually are and if there is any remodeling we need to do. At the thinkery they have free entries on Wednesday nights, therefore lots of people go. In our Capstone group, we were invited to go and test our product with the children and ask some survey questions to the adults. We want to be able to do the same, take our prototype and test it with the kids there, since there will be younger children and adults, it’s a different test field than at the Make-O-Rama. Hopefully we are lucky and there is a child or adult with arthritis that can try our our design. In going to test our design, we plan of informing people of the capabilities of the Makey Makey, but most importantly inform them of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis that many children suffer from.