Marlein Vogels

Week 1
After the introductory lecture, the group forming process started, which went smoothly for me. After the first group session on Tuesday, I still found myself struggling a bit with what the term "meaningful activity" meant. However, after Sofia and I started researching information about dementia, I found in the literature that it varies between individuals a lot what a meaningful activity is for them. After figuring this out, we started gathering some information about the opportunities and possibilities for music to aid people with dementia and/or caregivers for people with dementia.

Even though my background lies in Biomedical Engineering and not necessarily in Computer Science, I found the first week truly inspiring and I am highly motivated to continue developing our Foundation together.

Week 2
I found the stories about the music therapy in the lecture from Rebecca Schaefer fascinating. Especially the story about the "snoezelkamers" was eye-opening to me, as I was not aware yet of the possibilities of how simple technology applications can facilitate such a "fun and still comfortable" experience for people in care centers. In the group session, after we formulated our use case a bit more extensively, I started working on the Environment of our scenario.

Week 3
Learning how to make a design pattern was very interesting to me. Fortunately, I got the opportunity to work on the design pattern and rationale for our project. Although figuring out what a design pattern entails was interesting to me, as a person without a background in Computer Science, I found understanding ontologies rather challenging still.

Week 4
This week, Sofia and I made a start on the evaluation of our project. Litian and I prepared the first presentation for our project. Sofia, Litian and I tested and filmed the demonstration with Nao. In the second half of the week, Litian and I finished up the presentation.

Week 5
I the made a start with the ethical approach for our project. I was inspired by the templates TU Delft's ethical committee applies for research with human participants. Furthermore, we made a planning for the upcoming weeks for testing the robot. Also, Litian and I gave the first presentation. The questions that were asked during the discussion, such as: "How can we incorporate the caregiver in our scenario and design pattern?", were very helpful for us.

Week 6
I finished the ethical approach/documentation for our project. Sofia incorporated this in the introduction section of our evaluation and in the qualtrix questionnaire. We also tested our prototype on ourselves before starting the evaluation. We started the evaluation later that week on real participants. Sofia and I welcomed the participants and guided the participants throughout the experiment. Litian and Aleksanteri made sure the right scenarios were executed by Nao suitable for the occasion. My role was to note the observations during and after the interaction with the robot. For example, wrote down if the participants ate or drank during the experiment. Collecting quotes especially appeared to be a valuable and highly informative form of qualitative data for our evaluation. And last but not least, I provided the stroopwafels

Week 7
This week, we continued and finished our evaluation on Monday and Tuesday. I once again made notes during the experiment. I liked to see that many people were interested in our experiment. We even managed to gather some people who were hanging out at the building to take part in our experiment.
Furthermore, I adjusted the design patterns a little bit, incorporating the feedback we received.

Week 8
This week, I spent most of my time on finalising the XWiki and making sure all sections are elaborated thoroughly. Also, I added more detailed descriptions to our design patterns and added an introduction to our report. Another new thing I have done this week is I have written the section covering the observations and quotes from our evaluation. Although this was quite a challenge, since I have never written such a section, I found it fun to work on this section. Furthermore, I gathered the questions and feedback from the final presentation, given by Aleksanteri, Veikko and Sofia, and shared them with the group. We brainstormed about how to incorporate the feedback and questions best in our report/XWiki. During the final presentation, I tried to support my group mates by answering a few questions we received during the discussion.