Adaptive Technology

Mr. Robinson arranged a conversion with a guy named Tim. He lives in Port Coquitlam in a place called Nicola Lodge. Tim has Huntington’s Disease which results in the death of brain cells. We asked him some questions about himself and what he struggles to do in everyday life with the hopes of helping him. We asked him questions like, ‘Do you have trouble turning on the T.V?” or “Do you have trouble holding a pencil?”. Tim gave us some pretty good answers like how he needs help from Nicola, his daughter, to use the T.V or how he is no able to draw like he used to. Overall I think it is a very good idea to try to help Tim out. It is especially cool to use Skype for such a use as helping out another person other than just chatting with friends with the program.

Our idea to help Tim is to make a remote for him to change the channel of his T.V with big buttons to go channel up and down. Our group came up with this idea after we asked Tim if he can change the channel on his T.V. without help and he said no. After some brainstorming we came up with the idea to have two big buttons for him to press that would hopefully make it easy for him to press down without help so he could change the channel without Nicola. Someone who can help us with this idea is Jack’s cousin who solders and builds stuff for a living as he could teach us how to solder the wiring and put together the remote.

We are going to gather materials to make our remote from school or from our houses. Plastic or rubber buttons, wiring, solder and soldering iron will be some of the materials we need. We will need to learn how to solder and put together parts to build the remote. Jack’s cousin will teach us how to do most of these skills to accomplish the remote. We will contact him with Skype or other chatting services for him to show us what to do. An idea I found on Makers Making Change is using a buzzer toy and turning it into an input device, we could use that to hook up to a T.V. We would need to solder wire and change around the insides of the buzzer to make it work, but it is all do able. Further brainstorming or modification may be required with our group that is my first idea.

The solution fluency process went quite well for our group as we quickly brainstormed some ideas and solutions for our problems. Our group was able to clearly define the problem and come up with ideas on how we can fix it. Then we started designing a solution being the custom remote for Tim with big buttons. We still have not completed the last part of solution fluency which is evaluating because we have not yet completed the project, this part will come when we do a reflection at the end of the project.