Week 7

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Erin, Ayush, Jourdan, and me at Hartzell’s Ice Cream

Had quiet the restful 4-day weekend with spending time in Bloomington exploring at little more of the IU college town with good people! Jourdan really insisted on cooking up a storm at our dorm and have some people over and it was most definitely one

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Happy 4th of July

of the best 4th of July’s I have ever had. (Pro Tip: Willkie is a great place to play hide-and-go-seek. 🙂 )

I have to say though, one of the highlights was most definitely meeting Olivia’s amazing mother!   Even though it made me miss my mom so much more, it was just so great to have a loving parent physically here to spend a little time with. Love you Sandie!

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Olivia and me out brunching at Farm with her mom!

 

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Loved meeting this amazing lady! <3

 

 

 

 

Back to work, this week Olivia and I are tackling a sketch of our poster, work on our lightening speech for Friday, the paper (Draft our Abstract, Findings, and Discussion while continuing to finalize everything else), observe a crafting group at a senior center, and continue to work on Arudino for our quilt.

Observing at the Twin Lakes Recreation Center was a great experience, and thank you to Ben for all the phone calls to set all these up! Olivia and I went in pretty excited to be part of another part of the process of this needs assessment for Ben’s research. I think we did a pretty good job, I at least walked away with new skills, a better understanding of things to look out for, and of course took note of what I could have done better. For instance, I should have numbered off the individuals immediately, should have just wrote things in a better form of chronological order, and not just focus on factors that I think would be related to the Participatory Design. Just because it may not seem to be related, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be relevant later down the road. Olivia and I will be going again next week so I’ll get another shot in improving my observation skills! 🙂

Moving forward with Arduino, finally posting some of the data that Olivia and I rounded up from our testing session of our motion sensors. Below is our data of the sensor being in the center of the blanket and it was one of the candidates that we’er deciding on for sensor placement. We also saw consistent results of the sensors being at the top of blanket. Both sensed when there was movement in bed.

Motion Sensor center

Lightening Talks are due on Friday and I know I’m a little nervous. I know it’s only a minute long with three slides, but it’s still a little nerve racking with the amount of stage fright and lack of public speaking experience I have. So I’ll be practicing all this week really hard on my delivery.

 

Lightning Talk Speech

As the baby boomer generation now approaches the retirement age, the population of U.S. older adults will be larger than ever. When you take a look at the population pyramid, the increase becomes more evident.

In our ever-changing world, the use of technology has increased tremendously, even amongst the older adult population.

A recent Pew Research Center Poll reported that nearly 60% of seniors use the Internet.

Technological interest amongst the incoming wave of older adults provides an opportunity to explore the intersection of HCI and crafting.

With tools of maker technology, timeless aims in hobbies and crafting, and a focus on the older adult population; this research team strives to develop a toolkit that integrates these components.

Through the participatory design process, this toolkit will lead to the empowerment of the growing older adult population. They will be able to track, remind, or monitor their health by tailoring maker technology to their lifestyle.