Mobility for Toddlers

It has always astonished me how long it takes kids to get powered mobility. Not being able to move around has profound effects on cognitive and language development. Check out these robots:

(However, please don’t read the YouTube comments. YouTube comments are probably the most cognitively impaired language output on the planet. )

Combat helmet design and TBI

From the New England Journal of Medicine: (edited for brevity).

Among surviving soldiers wounded in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, TBI appears to account for a larger proportion of casualties than it has in other recent U.S. wars. [...]22 percent of the wounded soldiers from these conflicts [...] had injuries to the head, face, or neck. This percentage can serve as a rough estimate of the fraction who have TBI [T]he true proportion is probably higher, since some cases of closed brain injury are not diagnosed promptly.

In the Vietnam War, by contrast, 12 to 14 percent of all combat casualties had a brain injury, and an additional 2 to 4 percent had a brain injury plus a lethal wound to the chest or abdomen. [B]ecause mortality from brain injuries among U.S. combatants in Vietnam was 75 percent or greater, soldiers with brain injuries made up only a small fraction of the casualties treated in hospitals.

Kevlar body armor and helmets are one reason for the high proportion of TBIs among soldiers wounded in the current conflicts. By effectively shielding the wearer from bullets and shrapnel, the protective gear has improved overall survival rates, and Kevlar helmets have reduced the frequency of penetrating head injuries. However, the helmets cannot completely protect the face, head, and neck, nor do they prevent the kind of closed brain injuries often produced by blasts. As insurgents continue to attack U.S. troops in Iraq, most brain injuries are being caused by IEDs, and closed brain injuries outnumber penetrating ones among patients seen at Walter Reed[...] All admitted patients who have been exposed to a blast are routinely evaluated for brain injury; 59 percent of them have been given a diagnosis of TBI[...]. Of these injuries, 56 percent are considered moderate or severe, and 44 percent are mild.

So the design and engineering of armor has changed the nature of the injuries that happen on the battlefield.

the MKU Instavest prototype

Design. Engineering. Acquired disabilities. That sounds like this blog.

Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard, the development nickname for Macintosh OSX version 10.6, is available for sale today.
It has new accessibility features.

PCWorld article on these.

I’m particularly interested in the mirroring the screen with the trackpad feature. The trackpads on the new unibody laptops are huge. And I recall that Apple has patents on some haptic feedback touchscreen ideas. Could a built-in braille reader in the Macbook be possible?

Must remember to do a blog post about Windows 7 when it comes out.

Games that design themselves

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/games-design-themselves

Can we teach computers to co-construct in the way that people do? MIT Media Lab think so.

Braille e-book

http://www.yankodesign.com/2009/04/17/braille-e-book/

This isn’t out on the market yet, but this is a promising design.

Youngest person ever with carbon-fiber legs

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/4290002.Brave_girl_Ellie_May_has_a_spring_in_her_step/

This goes in the design and society blog because it really shows how far we’ve come in our attitudes toward disability. Prosthetic legs used to be designed to conceal the fact that they were prosthetic. Never mind that their design wasn’t much good for anything except sitting down and looking “normal.”

Ellie May’s prosthetics don’t look like natural human legs at all and they don’t have to! They are her legs. We judge them based on their function, not appearance. They let her walk and play like her peers, without the hindering pretense of hiding her disability. We don’t have to do that anymore.

I’ll bet in the near future we are going to see more designs that serve useful functions without being tied to traditional forms. However, it is hard to break free of doing things the way we always have (I should know; it’s what we are trying to do with communication systems at Penn State right now.)

Mintpad (proto-Siftable?)

Wow! Right after I repost the Siftable video, this thing is announced for release in the U.S.

Mintpad tablet device

I could see this thing replacing the BigMack or Step-by-Step devices. They’re about the same price and a million times more adaptable and capable.

Get the price down to $50 and use their networking capabilities to make an ad-hoc network with one another and you’ve almost got Siftables.

I think this is one of those technologies that the manufacturer is going to be astonished at what the end-user ends up doing with their product. The applications they are planning for this are all wrong. This thing is destined to be an interactive toy or an accessory to a more powerful central device. If I ran an AAC company, I’d be pushing to get the price down to $50 each and I’d sell them in packs of 6 or 9.

Engadget writes about Mintpad

Pocketables.com

Official website.

“That’s not fair”

I don’t know how to embed TED talks in WordPress, so click on this link and watch the video. Then come back here.

The key to using technology to overcome disabilities is to not try to duplicate the functioning of a “normal” person, but to give people capacities that they wouldn’t ordinarily have had.

AAC devices are not, and will never be, a “prosthetic voice” no matter how hard we work on designing them. We’re artificially limiting ourselves by trying. We can do better. We can make AAC a more powerful communication method.

Update: YouTube saves the day

More on buggies

Not the kind that require whips this time; baby buggies in this case.

New York Times brought to my attention the work of psychologist M. Suzanne Zeedyk of the University of Dundee, Scotland. Her recent study looked at two different types of baby stroller, those that face backwards toward the mother and those that face forward toward the environment:

Older "pram" style

A more typical modern style

What difference does it make, right?

Interactive toys

Now this is a toy with clever design!

TED talks

PDF from MIT Media Lab
As an AAC person, I am always thinking about modalities of communication and contexts for interaction. In addition, we need to be looking at new interfaces for humans and computers to communicate. This toy rethinks the way that people interact with the computer.