Project homeSimran - Self Reflection
Week 1: Introduction to Socio-Cognitive Engineering
Lecture: Introduction
The lecture introduced us to the standards of human-centered design and the concepts of socio-cognitive engineering.
The ReJAM and PAL projects were explained to us along with videos. These demonstrated how a robot can be used as a social actor for stimulating social, cognitive, affective and physical processes through building a human-robot partnership. These projects served as incredible inspiration for building robotic intervention for people with special needs, such as children with Type I diabetes or elderly residents of Pieter Van Foreest suffering from dementia.
We were also introduced to dementia, and challenges faced by people with dementia as the domain for which we would build a hybrid intelligence system.
Lab session: Storyboard, Quick Start
In the lab session, more details were given about the expectations from the project, and where to begin.
We started with an activity session in which we identified use cases associated with the challenges faced by people with dementia. My teammates and I used charts, sticker, and markers to create a storyboard around daily life situations faced by Georgina, the persona of our person with dementia. We also came up with personas and values after identifying other stakeholders, such as the formal caregiver, Eleana and the son of Georgina, Sam. We identified sundown syndrome, loss of interest in mealtime, and lack of interactions with her son Sam as some of the issues faced by her.
The storyboard activity played a big role in getting our creativity fired up and after narrowing down on the mealtime use case, we came up with the idea of employing interactive storytelling in order to help Georgina build back her interest in mealtime, along with providing interaction opportunities with the people around her.
We put our thoughts and ideas into the Quick Start section in order to kickstart the design of the solution we wanted to build.
We used rest of the week to conduct background research on robotic intervention for dementia patients as well as interactive storytelling as a tool to help with it.
Week 2:
Lecture: Cognition, music, memory and dementia
For this week's lecture, Professor Rebecca Schaefer gave a very interesting talk about how cognitive changes occur with dementia and how interventions can be designed and measured to enhance cognitive stimulation in a person with dementia. She also talked about the psychology of music and how music stimulates the brain. She further explained how music intervention can be designed for people with dementia and the benefits it can have.
While our use case does not directly involve music in the solution design, this lecture inspired me and my teammates to incorporate music in the interactive storytelling intervention that we were focusing on building. We discussed using pleasant background music during narration to provide a more immersive storytelling experience, along with playing the PwD's favourite songs while they ate. The cognitive stimulatory benefits of music therapy as discussed in the lecture provided for a solid foundation for this consideration.
Lab session: Scenario-based Design, Foundation
The lab session revisited the steps of the SCE method, with a focus on the Foundation part and an emphasis on Inclusive Design.
We also discussed in detail about our personas and their associated value stories, in order to inform our design decisions better.
Then we were introduced to scenario-based design and its benefits in reflecting the current situation (problem scenario) and the envisioned future (design scenario). We used our personas and value stories to formulate the problem and design scenario which would then be formalized into our main Use Case.
We focused on defining our environment and stakeholders and further developing our personas and enhancing the problem and design scenarios for the rest of the week. Building the scenarios helped to reflect on the reasons why we were building a human-robot interaction system in the first place, and allowed for a visualization how we would want the interactions to flow.