UD2014

Authors

Charlotte Magnusson, Britt Östlund, Kirsten Rassmus-Gröhn and Allan Hedlu

Session

A5. Navigation and wayfinding

Date and Time

2014-06-16, 14:25 - 14:45

Room

MA 7

Presentation PDF

Short oral presentation

Transcript of the talk

Thank you, I’m Charlotte. I work at the department who is organizing this conference although I have not been involved in the organization at all. Just followed from the sidelines and seen all of the work that has been put in. So I’m going to also talk about another project which seems to be quite similar in out look.
This has sort of a self explanatory name because it’s about navigation and memory.
>> I’m going to work mostly about the work we have done here. We have been working together with the stroke administration which we have appreciated very much. I have been involved if many projects but not with strokes. So the first thing I did is go out and talk to people because we somehow meet real people to get the real understanding of what might be important in this design. So we had, first we recruited ten persons and I noticed I prepared this slide, I noticed a slight error because it says, seven persons had a stroke but it was actually, six who had a stroke and one had a brain injury resulting in big memory problems. This person could walk past somewhere and you know, seconds later would not remember he had passed that place. And the interviews for the structure and I don’t know, this, I noticed in this case and many cases, you have to give up on the structure because you have to listen to the people.
So the kind of things that went out on the interview is on the top level and I think I have seen this in many other places as well is actually fear of falling. That’s a big concern and it’s an even bigger concern. If you have had a stroke, one of the common things is you get half sited motor problems which makes you more likely to fall but it also makes it very much harder for you to get up again. So it might be if you fall, you can’t get up. You may have problems but not necessarily. I had one person who had problems. You can also have perception problems, meaning it’s difficult to take in too much information at the same time and you might also have negligent like symptoms which means that, you’re not missing information from that part of the world but you’re not aware that part of the word is there.
You might think it’s strange, but actually, parts of it might be there. Due to better stroke care, these problems are, these days I have been told, much less. If you have memory problems, navigation becomes difficult and of course, if you have motor problems, routing is difficult.
Because if you do ordinary routing like on the maps or whatever, you would get, you might be routed past places where it’s really hard to walk or use a wheelchair or use an electric wheelchair. It’s important not to rely too much on words. And of course, as always, you need to think about people have visual problems or hearing problems. To compliment this because, you know, it’s also a point of having expert views, a person who was an occupational therapist had worked with people with strokes for a long time and sort of compared what the kind of things I had extracted from my interviews, I showed it to her and asked for comments.
And if you agreed, and she also added two things that I had missed but which I had especially the first the top one which is called brain tiredness. It’s quite common and yeah, if you have had a stroke or brain injury, it’s not ordinary tiredness, you hit the wall and you can’t do anything more. You have to think about that. We have seen it in testing and also but this is something you really have to consider. The second one, I haven’t seen yet. I think it depends on the person. This kind of initiation that you may have a with action even though you want to.
We even discussed a little bit around maps since this occupational therapist said maps are a big problem for this group because maps can be quite complicated, you have to do mental rotations, et cetera.
So maps are very difficult but during the interviews, I asked about maps and everyone said maps are fine and there’s no problems with maps but I think this is an open question.
But based on these interviews, we wanted to have focus groups so I made some nice scenarios and since my drawing skills are kind of limited, I made simple scenarios with stick man, stick women, whatever they are, stick person (laughing).
They contained simple design ideas like simply memory aid and simple people and you may want to remember a place or actually, you also, you know, you might if you like to go out and get exercise, you have to remember you have to turn around and go back before you get too tired so that’s another one and then there are some more, you know, call for help. It’s sort of outside of a scope in the sense of this project but the one thing everyday told me is they wanted this kind of security but you can do it out doors because you have these in the home today but they only work in doors, which means you tend to stay in doors if you need to call for help. This is, of course, I had different degrees of security or seriousness of the call for help so I’m not going to go through all of this. They had increasing complexity. After the focus groups, we added one which I’m hoping will be better and better but you know, you see these days at the bus stops, you know which bus is coming. So you know which bus is coming and you know also how long it will be before the next bus and which buss there are. The thing is, see is the keyword here and one of my persons had visual problems and he couldn’t see this so he just wanted that information but in some other form.
You know, you would like to know which bus, if it’s the right bus and probably also, the get off thing would be very nice. This also happens with teenagers. I know my son fell asleep on the train and woke up like an hour later in the wrong place and he was going to school so this was not a good thing. He was very late.
So after discussing these little scenarios, we came up with a set of requirements. Not very special but these are still kind of a bit high level requirements but still, it is very important with security and safety and that’s something you always have to think about.
It also needs to be flexible and adaptable depending on who you are. An important thing for this group is you should always be able to manipulate it with one hand. It’s quite common. I don’t know whatever it is. Half sited problems so the handed thing is important. It’s easy to manipulate, easy to bring and easy to remember, whatever that means. Maybe it remind you and also with the memory problems, you have to keep the text short, short, because if you have a long text, when you go to the long test, you I have to go back to the beginning of the text and it’s the same with the number of steps because if you have a lot of steps, you forget what happened before and also, to think about how much information is presented at the same time. And of course, you would want appropriate reminders and images were said before, a useful thing. To show things but it’s important to provide information multi modally and since it’s about navigation, preferably create something related to the real environment that would help you be grounded in the environment. And since this is a navigation problem, we still put the kind of things people would want on it.
The simple memory aid is slightly outside of the scope of the project but it’s still the thing that people would want. It’s lifeline type of functionality and then also, the accessible routing so you know that with the route you get actually is somewhere you can walk and also, of course, you sometimes want something very similar but some people depending on it, you might actually want more advanced things with maps and more information so you have to think of both. And based on this we produced some prototypes and we decided to do one very simple, this is the basic thing. One point and it takes me back to that point. I use it when I’m traveling because you can save the point and then go back to the hotel or whatever.
And the other prototype was done in Germany and it was a bit more complicated so it had different places you could choose and routes with images. I can actually apologize a little for the contrast in this image because there was a slight miscommunication between the developer in this case. We had written sort of the conservative color use and this person apparently interpreted that as all gray, somehow (laughing). I don’t know why that is but that’s what happened. So we tested this with 13 people and I’m not going to well, I think you find the details in the article.
In the environment, you can see here. It’s sort of a residential area. The red is the route because this explorer, the German app had to take you through a route so we did a route and then the whole compass is more like a compass. It just takes you back to the point.
Because we wanted to know that people could find, you know, a point they didn’t remember, we took them back to a point we started but almost back to another point which turned out to be a slight problem later.
Here, I’m going to show a little bit of the video which indicates one of the things we realized that actually, if you’re in an electric wheelchair, there doesn’t seem to be much so you need something to hold. It’s in Swedish any ways so what we’re talking about here is the direction and this person thought, pointing to the goal a little bit challenging because you have to decide, should I go on this side of the house or that side of the house.
So this is our first test after that, we made a holder but after that, we saw people had places to put it and we didn’t need it.
As an engineer, we thought, we should thought about that. When there’s an electronic wheelchair, there’s a lot of magnetic fields around the engine so you have to be careful where you put this thing because otherwise, it might misguide you somewhere else which may not be a good idea.
So the results of this early pilot is that while everyone could follow the direction, we had two persons who weren’t able to reach the goal. One person actually over exerted himself and we had to pick him up with a car. And one person would have walked this trail with the walker and we did this in December or November. We were lucky this time. The weather was crappy so we decide today do some interaction test in doors. We had some problems with well, it was mostly one person. This is a person with big memory problems to understand the test setting. He could follow the guidance okay but he forgot why he was supposed to do this. There was this thing about the home cam compass, why it didn’t point home because it was expect. Maybe it should take you back to the same place. We had a discussion about turn by turn navigation as to how the crow flies and there’s no real answer. Some people liked it pointed your direction. Some people referred turn by turn and the multimodalities is very important because otherwise, you might miss you have arrived or something like that. And of course, the attachment to the wheelchair and you have everyone who has done GPS things, you know, when it stops updating, it doesn’t actually tell you that so you have to check somehow and make sure it’s updating or not and the magnetic disturbans.
So the future work has hopefully improved things here. And we’re going to make field tests, the end of the summer, beginning of the autumn hopefully with slightly better weather. I don’t know I thought I might just indicate how the arrow works and maybe have some sound here then.
So if you point it basically in the right direction, it vibrates and now you can make a sound. You can turn it off. Now if you point it in the wrong direction, it doesn’t. You’re complimenting the arrow with both sound and vibration. And it is not advertised but it’s available on Google play if anybody wants to right? It’s available in different languages so I’m showing you the plans with a little bit better contrast for the routing application. So I think I’m stopping there since my time has probably run out.
>> Thank you, Charlotte for that presentation. Do we have questions here for the next few minutes?
>> Home compass, I think it depends on in Swedish and we’re translating the name and I know when you Google for it, when you search for it, it seems to you have to write the name in your language. It’s available in Swedish, English, German and dutch because these were the countries we tested in but it is a prototype.

>> I’m interested in the multimodality. Did you offer people a choice or did you talk to them about whether they would like all three or just some subset of those three?
>> Actually, when we tested it, we had the vibration only. We didn’t put the sound on. We asked people about the sound sometimes but there was nobody who really wanted that. I think the vibration, really, it was very appreciated.
Also, in the test, didn’t do ourselves. We got one of the result from the Dutch testing. They really liked the vibrations.
>> Does that mean you can be both deaf and blind and use it.
>> It’s an app,
>> Is it available for iPhone?
>> No, only Android. If you want to dig into the interface, interaction design, iPhone is quite difficult to work with. Android is for a developer, Android is easier. Okay, thank you.

Note

Rough edited copy by AVA AB and Certec, LTH

Remote CART provided by: Alternative Communication Services, LLC (acscaptions.com)

This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.