Daniel Louder

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Slide 2: Before I launch into my presentation, I'd like to discuss my personal development during this project.

Slide 3: When I began this project, I first asked myself: What am I passionate about? What do I want to do as a project?

Slide 4: Then I realized that the question I should have asked myself was: What do I want to be passionate about? How do I want to develop my skills? What is my overall personal goal for this project? How do I want to develop as a person, through this project?

Slide 5: I realized that I wanted to be passionate about people. I want to be passionate about helping people. I want to be passionate about connecting people. I want to be passionate about understanding people. Design is the medium that I use to do this.

Slide 6: I then asked myself, "What project would be the most people-centric?" I came to the conclusion that the most people-centric project (for me) that I could do was a physical therapy project. The merging of physical therapy and industrial design remains, based on my research, largely untapped and I knew that helping people to help people would be a good, people-centric project while putting my design skills to work.

Slide 7: I ended up working with physical therapist Kimberly Cole at the Walla Walla General Hospital. Here's a map of the hospital for the edification of the audience.

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Slide 9: This is the lesson that I learned from that experience: The problems that people encounter with their products are often miniscule in appearance, but leave much to be improved upon.

Slide 10: After talking with Kim a bit, I learned about this device. It's called a cervical goniometer. It's used to measure the flexibility of a patient's neck in three axes. It works pretty well, but if two therapists administer the same test to the same patient, they may get different results. This is due to variations in fit, location, and other details about the device. It ends up wasting patient and therapist time and money. Not to mention potential harm or risk included with such inaccuracies.

Slide 11: This is an illustration of the three axes that are measured: tilting side, tilting forward, and turning. I took the device and tried putting the compasses and inclinometers in various locations and tried different types of padding, to see if the accuracy could be increased. I finally gave a status update to my advisor about the changes I was doing to the present device.

Slide 12: When I told him about my strategy of changing the sensor location and padding/straps, he told me that I was just putting new skin on the same device. I wasn't coming up with anything new. I wasn't thinking broadly enough. Basically, I needed to think bigger, and dream better.

Slide 13: I then stepped back and looked at how the device could interact with the patient's head. In order to measure neck flexibility, there were four general methods: x-ray, ultrasound, motion capture, and a digital device.

Slide 14: The first method I considered was ultrasound. It works by bouncing sound waves off of the bones of the head. This is pretty accurate, but it's not very portable and needs special training to use. Not to mention, it tends to be quite expensive.

Slide 15: This is the device that would be used to measure flexibility using ultrasound. As you can see, it's not very portable.

Slide 16: The next method I considered was radiography, also called x-ray. This is of course the most accurate (it looks directly at the bones, after all) but needs special training, and is expensive as well as slow. In addition, it cannot be administered often due to risks from radiation.

Slide 17: This is the most portable x-ray device that I could find online. Not at all portable. If a therapist is going house-to-house and wheeling this device behind him or her, it isn't going to do much to make patients very comfortable, especially if they don't want the therapist there in the first place.

Slide 18: The next method I examined was motion capture. This method involves placing markers on a person's head (for instance, on their temples and between their eyebrows) and taking pictures or video of their movement with a camera. The computer software then compares the pictures and generates data about their flexibility. While this method is potentially inexpensive and portable, it is also slow and is likely to have the same problem as the current method (what if a therapist places one of the markers one centimeter higher than another therapist?).

Slide 19: Here is a photo illustrating the marker setup. This example is for video games, there would likely be less markers.

Slide 20: The last method I considered was a digital device, connected to a computer. It had the potential to be accurate (depending on the setup) and fast.

Slide 21: I looked online for a digital cervical goniometer, and this was the result. There wasn't, based on my most recent research, any device like this.

Slide 22: My next step was to boil down the overall idea into specific details. Here I looked at the strap, where it would be, and if it would even be necessary.

Slide 23: I looked at how the various electrical components of the device might be placed on the head, and how it would interact with the head, and the patient in general.

Slide 24: I also examined the way the therapists would interact with the device. How easily could they adjust it? Would it be as simple as possible to measure cervical flexibility?

Slide 25: I found that with a design similar to glasses frames, the device would have the most consistent results. This is for two reasons, first the frame is stable with its weight on the ears and nose. This isn't a lot of weight, mind you, but having the device sitting on dense tissue (bone and cartilage) rather than softer tissue (flesh, fat, and muscles) makes it more stable for more consistent results. Secondly, the fit of the device over the nose and ears isn't likely to change. The current device sits over hair and scalp, and any changes in haircut or gaining or losing of weight changes the fit.

Slide 26: My next step was to look at the electrical components of the device. I learned that many similar components were in the nike + (Plus) sensor and that was about the size of a small domino. In addition, the Nike + sensor has about 1000 hours of active use time from its nonremoveable battery, which gave me a positive sign about running time.

Slide 27: For more electrical information, I spoke with Karl Thompson of the Technical Support Services at the university and he felt that the device would indeed be small enough to go onto a glasses frame-type device. In fact, he said that the components could all be in a single unit, and the best place for this unit would be over the bridge of the nose to make the device balanced as well as aesthetically pleasing. I agreed, and eventually came up with this sketch.

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Slide 29: I personally think this device will be a success. Just look at how happy the model is wearing it. :)

Slide 30: (Not included in presentation.) I learned three main things: first, that I want to be passionate about people.

Slide 31: (Not included in presentation.) I learned, also, that problems (in design) are often hard to see and even harder to articulate.

Slide 32: (Not included in presentation.) Lastly, I learned that we need to think bigger and dream better.

Slide 33: (Not shown in presentation.) My thank-you slide. The format of the presentation wasn't conducive to this slide, so I left it out.

Slide 34: (Not shown in presentation.) Thank you.