Social Robot Teddy Bear by Fujitsu – for dementia patients

Teddy bears are not just cuddly creatures for kids at bed time. Fujitsu Labs has developed a prototype teddy bear for adults that’s packed with some sophisticated hardware and can interact with and respond to humans. The stuffed bear is being called a  “social robot with a personality,” and can make simple gestures, eye contact and small talk.

The hope is to use them for “robot therapy” in geriatric medicine for patients that suffer from dementia, says Fujitsu.

Fujitsu’s teddy bear robot is reminiscent of Pleo, the green robotic dinosaur capable of displaying basic emotions through animatronics and reacting to its surroundings. Despite Pleo’s innovative approach and tech capability, the robot didn’t really become a mainstream sensation –largely because it was positioned as a toy.

Fujitsu’s teddy bear robot comes with loftier ambition. The robotic teddy bear can be plugged to a PC using a USB port. Sensors stuffed into it help it make some gestures such as lifting one of its furry hands up in response to external stimuli.

The bears have a miniature camera built into their nose so they can automatically wake up from sleep state when they sense a person nearby and can turn in their direction.  A voice synthesizer inside the device lets it channel the voice of a young boy. The sound is projected from a built-in speaker and synchronized to the robot’s behavior.

The robotic bears are capable of up to 300 movement patterns including raising its arms, looking downwards and kicking its feet. The movement are combined with display of “emotions” to signal happiness, sadness and anger, says Fujitsu. And since the robot can be connected to the PC, new movements can be recorded and displayed.

What makes these robots interesting, says Fujitsu, is that it is interactive and real, in a world that is increasingly filled with virtual interactions. The bears can be played with and are likely to integrate easily into people’s lives, says the company.

Fujitsu hopes its teddy bear can help develop “robot therapy,” a way to use robots to help people overcome challenges or problems–much like how animals are used to cheer up patients in some hospitals today.

If you want to see how the robotic teddy bears work, check out this video:

Source: Wired

Science-Inspired Design: Nudging Medication Intake Behaviour

*** Please watch from 7:30 ***

A TED video by French artist Mathieu Lehanneur. It’s still just a concept but the basic idea is to have the “orb” get sicker as the patient neglects to take her medicine.

The boy…has asthma. His asthma medicine is in that light-bulb looking thing on the night table. I think it is a kind of inhaler.

If the boy doesn’t take his medicine on time, the inhaler will change color “displaying its own physiological problem and indicating to the patient the urgency of taking the medication.”

In other words, the device “gets sick” if the boy doesn’t use it. And when he does, it gets better (and so does he!) This design taps into our desire to help others feel better. Clever, no?

Source: Nudge

A great way to build an emotional relationship between the patient and the medication. I also love the idea of flipping the position – from the boy needing the medication, it flips to the medication needing the boy. That’s amazing.

Vodaphone – Creating Perceptive Spaces

Vodafone is coordinating Persona, a European Commission-funded project, for which a number of pilots have already been completed. It comprises a consortium of academic, medical, and private technology organisations in Europe tasked with developing a range of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies that help disabled and senior citizens to live in their homes for longer.

Some of the features in this service is what I envision the Monitoring system to include for our project. Maybe more simplified but the idea is basically the same – to allow AD patients to live in their own home environment as long as possible.

Voda Phone + Red Cross = Assited Living For AD Patients

Vodafone is working with the Spanish Red Cross to offer a service called SIMAP – Intelligent Personal Alert Monitoring System – which supports people with Alzheimer’s disease and their care givers. It is a personal monitoring service with an alert programme that provides information on the user’s location, either on demand or in the event of an emergency. The Alzheimer’s patient has a mobile terminal with a built-in GPRS modem and GPS receiver linked to the SIMAP platform. The terminal automatically submits its position and status to the platform every three minutes, with the possibility of customising this time interval.

 

BodyNotes – Remote Collaboration Applied to Prosthetics

One of the projects that came out of the New Media Medicine’s second annual Health and Wellness Innovation activity, held at the MIT Media Lab in January 2011. Eleven teams took their ideas for patient empowerment from concept to prototype in just two weeks. Their exciting results have been captured in a series of videos that we will be releasing in regular blog posts throughout this month. Here is the intro video to get things rolling.

Not directly related to Alzheimer’s but I think it’s inspiring to see the video.

Getting in the Flow: Changing Behavior

Another blog post from frog design:

New ways to think about how to create emotional bonds and lasting meaning in behavior change.
Let me start this blog post with a bold statement: I’m a happy man. I love my work at frog and all of the challenges that come with it. I love to share my knowledge with other fellow designers and learn from them. I love my family and my friends who make my life special and always support me during the difficult moments. I love to stay fit and I do everything I can to have a healthy lifestyle. And finally, I love to travel, to experience new cultures and to visit new places.

In order to keep this happiness flowing, I make extensive use of a set of well-proven tools. I use Twitter to exchange professional information with my colleagues. I use Facebook to stay in contact with my family members and friends all over the world. I use Nike Plus to track my movement and stay motivated. I use Foursquare and Dopplr to discover new places and track my trips.

Apparently I’ve managed to turn my entire life in what American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a “flow experience”: a challenging activity that a) requires skills b) provides clear goals and feedback c) requires concentration on the task at hand, d) implies a (partial) loss of self-consciousness and e) a transformation of time.

Flow experiences bring happiness and harmony to people’s lives by cultivating purpose and by forging the resolution needed in the pursuit of one’s goals. And this means that if we are able to design the appropriate flow experiences, we, as designers, are able to actively influence people’s lives and make them happier and more harmonious.

Right now there is a lot of talk about gamification and the power playful experiences have in changing people’s behavior. In a previous blog post I also illustrated a few successful examples in this space. When it comes to changing people’s lives,  I think that games and game mechanics are great tools for cultivating purpose – they set goals and enforce the appropriate rules – but they fall short when it comes to forging resolution.

How can we make people’s flow experiences enjoyable in the short term, but also sustainable and meaningful in the long run? In their book, “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard,” authors Chip and Dan Heath suggest 3 solutions:

1. Find the feeling: Although our instinct tells us to teach people why they should do something, this often leverages negative emotions like guilt and fear (“smoking causes lung cancer”) that have a narrowing effect on their thoughts. If we want people to successfully deal with broad and complex problems such as “living a healthy life,” we need to leverage positive emotions like joy or pride, which broaden the kind of activities people contemplate for the future and encourage them to pursue even bigger goals.
2. Grow the people: Some people think the most intimate traits of their personality, their abilities or even their intelligence, are finite and cannot be changed or increased. Others think that their abilities are like muscles and can be strengthened through effort and practice. According to Stanford’s Carol Dweck, the former have a “fixed mindset,” and the latter have a “growth mindset.” When designing for a lasting change, promoting a “growth mindset” will help people to stretch their abilities and do things they didn’t even consider in the first place.
3. Shrink the change: Sometimes a goal will appear too challenging even to the most willing and enthusiastic person. In these cases we can shrink the change and get the ball moving with simple and approachable goals, and let people face increasingly challenging goals only after confidence and enthusiasm have been gradually built.

Game mechanics have proved to be successful in cultivating purpose, but only by forging resolution and making changes sustainable and meaningful over time, can we bring harmony in people’s lives. Once we reach harmony, our consciousness is so ordered that, to put it in Csikszentmihalyi’s words, we “need not fear unexpected events, or even death. Every living moment will make sense, and most of it will be enjoyable”.

The Gamification of Healthcare

A great blog article from frog design:

When I started to use Nike Plus I couldn’t imagine I would end up enjoying running so much. Nike Plus allowed me to keep a record of all of my runs and gather feedback and motivation from friends on Facebook, where all of my runs are automatically posted. Thanks to a challenge we’ve set up in the frog Milan Studio, I’ve pushed my limits much farther than I would have ever expected only a month ago.

You might wonder why this should matter to you. Well, it’s a long story and for the purpose of this post we’ll keep it short: global changing factors such as aging population, growing incidence of chronic diseases and sky-rocketing costs are undermining the healthcare system as we know it.

Healthcare needs to be reframed: we need to move away from a system which is HCP-centric, based on treatment and prescriptions, command and control. We need to move towards a patient-centric system, based on prevention and behavior improvements, whose records are constantly collected. In the past few years many products and services designed around this new framing have been successfully launched: Proteus IEMs, Adidas Micoach, Dexcom Seven, Philips Directlife, and Zeo Sleep Monitor. What all of these products have in common is that they record data through sensors, provide users with feedback and help them change their behavior accordingly.

When it comes to behavior change,  BJ Fogg’s mantra “put hot triggers on the path of motivated people” becomes a must, but with one caveat: motivating people affected by a disease, especially if it is a chronic one, can be extremely hard. That’s why the healthcare world has started to borrow some of the mechanics that have made many games so successful. This has helped to increase motivation and turn behaviors that would be extremely hard to trigger, such as undergoing chemotherapy, losing weight or exercising more,  into less painful, if not pleasurable experiences.

“Gamification” is a hot topic in the design community these days and it’s up to us, as designers, to turn it into an opportunity for the good. Check out my presentation on how to design for behavior change in healthcare for more details.

Watch the Presentation by frog design

SMS Mirror Concept

Robert Stadler’s concept “+336+mirror”, reveals messages received on your cellphone via SMS.

Get close enough tot he mirror and you see that text shining at you, jarring your reverie with its urgent news, good or bad. [via Gizmodo]

Could this type of technology be used to communicate with patients (non-AD) or caregivers to give the the “support of the day” type of message?

Nokia Open Lab

“Chipchase [well-known design researcher for Nokia] and his team conduct ethnographic research throughout the world, focusing on emerging behavior related to mobile technologies, and they’ve pioneered several techniques. As a core element of UCD, ethnographic research is a type of participatory design that is typically used to actively engage users and reveal insights without overtly influencing the context of use. In an ongoing project called Nokia Open Labs, Jan and his team are flipping this traditional model on its head.

Instead of recruiting users anonymously in a given community, the Open Labs team takes participatory design out into the open — to the commons — as an active form of community engagement. Chipchase uses posters, events, and prizes to attract as large a cross section of the community as he can. In the process, he creates a network of influence, and the result is a type of social cohesion that builds community consensus around the idea of exploring new possibilities and embracing new futures. Yes, one of the objectives of these activities is to inform the design of Nokia’s products and services. But that may take years to realize. In the meantime, Chipchase achieves a more immediate and direct impact in the community through a change in mindset. He’s creating fertile ground for new social practices to emerge — in this case around mobile technologies.”

From: Design With Intent – How designers can influence behavior

Today, the Lab is evolving into something much bigger from where it started:

Nokia Open Lab, held in Helsinki, is an event with the aim of provoking global discussion on a mobile future. The event is the first of its kind hosted by Nokia, where an invited set of social media participants from bloggers to forum members and everyone in between will be taking part in workshops that will focus on the future of mobile and co-creation of media. The event’s benchmarks of learning for both the attendees and Nokia include how social interactions and technological interactivity affect us.

What about US?

Could we do this at In-sync? How about an “Innovation for Well-being Conference” where we as host invite thought leaders and innovative designers from the various genres and discuss the meaning of well-being in healthcare industry? Artists, scientists, yoga teachers… it could be an event of unorthodox mix, where unlikely members collaborate and discuss an idea.

The creative conference event I did in Japan, Public/image.METHOD was a based on a concept like this. We invited 10 creators (artists, designer, IT, photographer, anime director, web designer, etc) and put them in teams of two. We had 5 very diverse and unlikely paired collaborative teams – each with a different theme or collaboration project. The event was meant to become a platform of collaboration, inspiration and new product launching pad.

The event, for the agency (ANSWR) that I was working for, was not only a new product but also a very clever way to market itself. As the target of the conference was the top creative influencers in Tokyo, we chose the speakers and themes accordingly, based on what’s up and coming and fresh. At the end of the event, ANSWR’s name was known in the industry as the “it” agency.

COULD WE DO THIS???

Free Burma’s Political Prisoners

Here is a very effective and persuasive Installation Design by JWT New York.

Petition to free burma’s political prisoners