PROCESS: THE CAPTIVATOR

Hospitals, while being great for health, are often places in which people experience a lot of emotional stress, boredom, and discomfort. This is often due to the long waiting periods that both patients and the caregiver go through when waiting to meet with a doctor. It is often the case that a patient and caregiver may be waiting two hours for a five minute talk with the doctor. The Captivator is a device that address the issue of ambiguous hospital waits by giving the caregiver and the patient a device that gives a time estimate of when the doctor will attend to them. The device does this by changes color depending on where in the waiting and meeting process they are in, in relation to the doctors rounds. 

Our goal was to create something that relieved stress. We brainstormed about different senses that we could work with that would relived stress. We settled on sight and touch because those were the most direct senses to work with given our time period. Touch is a very powerful tool. We used Bristol board to create three dimensional shapes. We experimented with symmetrical shapes like the dodecahedron and the isodecahedron. We also experimented with organic shapes. In addition to that, we looked into different ergonomic shapes. The organic ergonomic shapes felt good but where not as aesthetically pleasing as the symmetrical ones. Even though the symmetrical shapes might now appear to be nice to touch, the dodecahedron is. Once we decided on the shape we experimented with the size of the object. We wanted it to be something a person could hold. Our only constraint was that it was necessary that an Arduino Nano could fit in the object. 

When experimenting with sight, we decided we wanted a colored light to be the sign of when the doctor would arrive. We worked on different ways to diffuse the LEDs because that is something that is really beautiful. In the initial phases of our design we experimented with the Captivator casting patterned shadows in addition to just light. We did not follow through with this primarily because of the time constraint. 

Hospitals, while being great for health, are often places in which people experience a lot of emotional stress, boredom, and discomfort. This is often due to the long waiting periods that both patients and the caregiver go through when waiting to meet with a doctor. It is often the case that a patient and caregiver may be waiting two hours for a five minute talk with the doctor. The Captivator is a device that address the issue of ambiguous hospital waits by giving the caregiver and the patient a device that gives a time estimate of when the doctor will attend to them. The device does this by changes color depending on where in the waiting and meeting process they are in, in relation to the doctors rounds. 

The goal of the Captivator was to make something that both distracted the patient from the situation they are in by being both tactile and visually pleasing. At the same time, it is also a useful tool because it relieves some of the ambiguity of the wait time. We went through a bunch of iterations of the shape of our design and decided on a dodecahedron because it is both ergonomic to the joints of the hand and is also an intruiging shape to look at. The Captivator uses a bluetooth shield connected to an arduino to recieve signals determining when to light up the LEDs in the caregiver/patients device.