Exhibition 1_Page Group 24?

Introduction

Welcome to the 1st Exhibition of Group 24! We are Brit, Ruixuan and Xavi?re. And during the past 3 weeks, we?ve been working on developing concepts and prototypes for optimizing the experience of patients who will take a reconstruction surgery on the facial area or breast, together with Erasmus MC. During the exploration and prototyping, we have developed further design directions. The following video gives you a quick introduction to our design & prototyping process in the past 3 weeks.

Timeline first 3 weeks

In the last 3 weeks, we explored several different technologies and applied them to our concepts, such as the conversational model by machine learning, visual simulation in p5.js, and creating a haptic experience by using Arduino, etc. And there are 3 low-fi prototypes developed as shown in the following.

1. The visual simulator:

The initial idea we had is to visually simulate the facial or breast reconstructions for the patients who considering taking the reconstruction surgeries. And by simulation from intermediate steps towards the end result, this simulator helps the user to explore what they will experience during the recovery process.

Link to prototype:

p5.js Web Editor

A web editor for p5.js, a JavaScript library with the goal of making coding accessible to artists, designers, educators, and beginners.

https://editor.p5js.org/b.vanderrijt/full/vg-HB09Ok

2. The Empathetic AI Partner:

Furthermore, we have a great interest in the experience of female patients who have breast removal and planning to take reconstruction surgeries. Since we found that the removal of breasts has a large negative influence on their sexuality and some patients said they don?t feel ?completed? or ?female? anymore. Hence, we developed this empathetic AI partner for the female patient and empathetically guides them to explore their own body, together with haptic interaction, to re-build their confidence and expectations.

3. Explorative AI conversation tool:

After testing with the 2nd prototype, we found that it?s tricky to involve AI in intimate interaction with the user since the trust-building process between the user and AI takes time, and the context of use also plays an important role. Besides, from research, we found that 80% of female patients who had breast removal are partnered. Hence, we then focused on how does removal and reconstruction surgery influence female patients? sexuality and their connections with partners. Hence we build this explorative conversation tool to detect certain keywords during the conversation between couples and initiate the talk into the expectation building, and triggers and positive feedback from a physical device on the patient?s body.

Design Challenges

During the iterative design and prototyping process, we tried out different technologies in our prototyping. Through iterative design and prototyping on each Monday and Friday, we identified potential design challenges:

• How can we help the user to build their expectation for the after-effect of the reconstruction surgeries?

• How can we involve the other stakeholders (i.e. partners, families, and friends) in the decision-making and expectation-building process?

• How does breast reconstruction surgery influence the female patients? sexuality and connection with their partners? And how can we user AI to facilitate them build their expectations together?

What?s next?

• Continue with the experience and expectation-building between female patients and their partners

• Explore and try new technologies such as VR and AR, and try to combine the visual simulation and creating the haptic experience

• New concept this week: ?Switch-perspective VR model with haptic experience?