Rick

Week 1:

Learned the context of the use case. Started working on the quick start and pretty quickly settled on a concept. Our group is now going to make a pet-like robot as a social companion. The quick start lecture was super useful to get started. I had missed the first lecture, so I missed a bit of context, but the quick start lecture got me going pretty soon.

Week 2:
Really enjoyed the guest lecture by Rebecca Schaefer! In terms of our project it was relevant to get us thinking about sound design and the importance of vocal communication/also linking this project to music. But personally it was great to get an insight into the brains of people with dementia and the progression of the illness. Rebecca seems really knowledgeable about this subject, which was great! A take-home message from this lecture that I got was: especially in late stages of dementia, it is way more important to lift up people’s spirits than to help them remember things and remind them of what they can’t do in this way.

Week 3:
Concretized our concept design a lot more. We also did a lot of literature this week into our specific design to identify what would benefit people in our use case most and to make a good research question and hypothesis.