Our team’s idea was to create a glove that would help Sara indicate essential information like suction, bath room breaks, etc by capturing and exaggerating the movements she already makes. We wanted a glove that would not be trigged by her involuntary movements while capturing things she wished to convey. To do this Tiana, Veda and I realized that we needed to fully understand Sara’s range of movements.
Through the information Sara’s Mother and Courtney provided it was clear that Sara had some control over her thumb and index finger. It was harder to judge through Sara’s videos the extent of this dexterity. For example we were not able to analyze how far she could move her index finger, at what speed and the length of time she could keep her index finger upright.
This is why we decided our first prototype should be about capturing Sara’s current movements to analyze them so that we would know the range and extent of her voluntary and involuntary movements.
We decided to have two flex sensors on her thumb and index fingers (Sara’s dominant fingers) that would trigger color changes in an RGB Led.
I ended up working on most of the Arduino programming while Tiana and Veda worked on stitching up the glove, documenting our progress and on the materials and aesthetic choices.
Programming with the Arduino was initially a tough process.
I tried to take the coding one step at a time. Initially I started with just one flex sensor and once I got that to work I added one RGB Led. Learning the language of processing was a little tricky where even a ‘;’ could make a huge difference.
As I added the next flex sensor and another RGB Led the circuits became more complicated and the intertwining wires made it all the more confusing. There was a point where one of the alligator clips lost conductivity and that was the reason our circuit did not work.
Once I got the wires to work I got very excited and I realized that once the circuit was working and the code was solved I actually enjoyed programming the glove.
Working in a team with Tiana and Veda was very enjoyable. They were fun to hang out with and we worked well together with our assigned roles.
Once Veda and Tiana finished most of the stitching and wiring I also got to dabble a little in stitching the final touches onto the glove.
The first prototype works great. I hope we get a lot of information out of it that we can use to further develop our final concept.