The Problem:

It is challenging for doctors to collect accurate self reported information from children about their level of pain due to lack of communication skills, fear, anxiety, and discomfort. Traditional 1-10 pain scales do not fully address these issues, often leading to uncomfortable children and inaccurate symptom information.

The Solution:

Penelope the Pain-O-Monster is a plush toy that uses integrated pressure sensors to allow children to express their source and level of pain through play. An additional “Fun” mode provides distraction from pain and anxiety.

Detailed Solution:

The stuffed animal has force sensors in different body parts that light up from blue to red depending on how hard they are pushed to show the child’s pain level. There is also a game mode with an interactive lights game to take the child’s mind off their situation. 

Further Elaboration:

Main Story or Theme: Our project is a spin off of our Emotion Owl project which was for kids with autism to express themselves. We thought about making a different stuffed animal to help kids in hospitals, we realized that the pain charts that patients used to express their pain could be made more interactive and easier for a child to use. We read that playing with stuffed animals can take the children’s mind off the pain so we decided to incorporate a game mode.

Mechanics:

We have a switch that turns the stuffed animal off, puts it on the pain-o-meter mode or the game mode. It is connected to an exterior power to be able to power six LED light strips and six force sensors. Everything is connected to an arduino which is basically a small computer we programmed. The lights and force sensors are matched up to different body parts. The child would press where it hurts with as much pressure as it hurts and the light in that body part will turn on. The color goes from blue, not that much pain to red, the most pain. The game mode has a random strip light up and the child has to press the corresponding force sensor in that body part as fast as they can before they restart.

Development:

We started out by having many ideas about what we would put in the different modes, like a heartbeat and rainbow colors. We also thought about sound and smell but those were all very ambitious. We liked the game where different colors light up in a pattern and you have to press the force sensors in the same pattern, each round the pattern got more complicated. This was hard to generate randomly because there was no simple way to repeat the past exact two colors again in the same place and then add another random color. We decided it was still fun to have  limited amount of time to press the force sensor corresponding to the light that lit up, there was no pattern in this game but there is a random aspect because the lights lite up in a random order after you press the right force sensor. In the pain-o-meter mode we knew that we were going to have the color go from blue to red depending on the amount of pain. We decided to make a stuffed animal that looked like an alien with a heart pocket. We had two iterations of our ‘alien’ we ended up choosing one that looked more like a monster.

Challenges:

We faced a various programming challenges. First we had to find a way to connect the arduino board to an external power source, we used a portable charger and cut an USB cable to connect the wires to. It took us a while to set up the three position switch and have all the power connected to the board so that the LED lights were controlled by the switch and not the portable charger directly. We also had trouble connecting the two modes and getting them to work correctly. Robin helped us a lot with the coding and helped us use arrays to keep track of all the different light strips and corresponding force sensors. We couldn’t quite get the game as sophisticated as we first envisioned but we made a game that is still usable and fun. We also had so many delays in the program that is messed up the two independent timers for the heartbeat. We decided to not use a heart beat.

Sometimes objects fall down, and we either can't or don't want to pick them up. Regardless of the case, the Trunk is here to help. This is not your ordinary household grabber, either; the Trunk has a unique piece of bendable wood that curves around objects you want to pick up at your command, as opposed to the standard claw mechanism. It can move in two directions, to open and close.

My original idea was to design something to the standard claw mechanism so that it could be opened and closed at the push of a switch, but after the idea's conception I was encouraged to go further and redesign the claw part entirely. To start brainstorming, I looked how various animals carried objects, specifically insects.

It was later that I then decided to look at elephants for their trunks (natural progression, I know) once I realized just how truly unique they were; instead of simply picking something up with little appendages, elephants use their trunks to curl around objects before bringing them to their mouth. It was here that I decided on my final general idea, and where I eventually decided on the name for the final product to be "the Trunk" (as well as the affectionate working title, Project Elefante).

Once all that was set in stone, I decided to go ahead and make the first iteration. For this design, I had a piece of cardboard in the shape of a long trapezoid split into 17 segments. Instead of slanted edges, they were set up like stairs (each segment was slightly longer than the last.

We created a toy that helps children develop fine motor skills. Similar to the way that many people insert contacts, our toy is specifically tailored to hone skills for holding open an eye to insert a prosthetic eye. It also familiarizes children with vocabulary for the different parts of their faces in order to help them feel more comfortable and understand what is going on during doctor visits. Many children at Perkins School for the Blind have some form of cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder that affects muscle control and fine/gross motor movements. Some of those children have also lost an eye and have an ocular implant and an ocular prosthesis. Our goal was to help those children learn to care for their prosthetic eyes when they have to take them out to clean them. After doing some research on toys to help children develop fine motor skills, we decided to make a toy bunny with the objective of holding open the eyelid and putting the eyes in correctly. We wanted our toy to have varying levels of difficulty, so we put the bunny on a stand with 3 different angles. The less obtuse the angle, the harder it is to put in the eyes. The bunny also wears glasses, much like many of the children from Perkins, so the final level of difficulty is to put the bunny's glasses on the child and have then practice the motion in their own eye. In addition, those children will have many doctors' appointments where they should know what is going on, so we added touch sensors to different parts of the face that upon touch, will say what part of the face it is. We used a wide variety of materials and methods in making the bunny, ranging from wood to 3D printed parts to an Arduino.

EmotaBot is robot that evokes empathy in users by reacting to neglect in a way that imitates conciousness.

In the developing world of AI (Artificial Intelligence) the concept of conciousness is a prominant topic of discussion. The question everyone is asking is "can machines have conciousness?." Unfortunately, the answer isn't so simple; conciousness is defined by many different abilities and cannot just be measured as a binary answer. For our project, we were tasked with reproducing some of these defining abilities in order to give our robot the appearance of conciousness; specifically its ability to react to abuse. When placed in a confined space, the robot will become increasingly uncomfortable, until it becomes completely panicked. Throughout the process, it expresses its grief with a series of movements and changes in expression. This scenerio is inspired by pet neglect. Pets are often left in their carts/cages by their owners when they become too burensome. We wanted to recreate this situation because we were interested in the passivity of this kind of abuse.

Our project is a spherical bot with an ultrasonic sensor to evaluate its surroundings. It rotates 360 degrees on a stepper and the face moves up and down on a servo. In addition, the face has two micro servos above the eyes for eyebrows, giving it the ability to emulate facial expressions. Our robot is entirely 3D printed with lasercut acrylic circles placed over the outer shell of the bot in order to let an RGB LED shine through. The light will be yet another indicator of the robot's mood.

We are making a robot that mimics human characteristics within an interaction, especially when reacting to abuse. The device is supposed to trick the people who have it, that it has some sort of consciousness and for them to create an emotional attachment to it. The robot will also act like a human and respond to a certain type of abuse in a way that people would. The idea for the mediator came to me the second the topic was proposed and I had the vision for something that I thought could be special. I immediately began to formulate an entire plan and vision for the project, with a dream for everything this could do. I not only wanted it to react to abuse and be cool, but also help people and benefit others in a way I believe in significantly. The entire thesis was for the mediator to regulate a fight, reacting when the volume and tone of voice was too loud around it. When hearing this it would first cuddle up and almost protect itself, but then quickly become restless and begin to slam its fists on the table, quieting with a loud noise and aggression. My least favorite image, when thinking this through, was a young child sitting there and witnessing his or her parents fight, helpless and feeling alone. The robot would try to appeal tho this empathy and make people more aware of their surroundings, as they will realize that if they make the robot feel a certain way, it is probably the same for the people around them. Although, will become firm and get them to quite by action and almost scold them. This will almost act as a way to help people love more, fight less, and control themselves when angry. My vision was also that it would create relief for a child who is going through a horrible situation like that and will have someone/thing who is feeling the same emotion and is there for them. It will change the way people fight and interact and hopefully help teach people and improve their actions through the power of love and empathy. What is wood, with moving head and arms, will hopefully be able to improve one of the biggest problem in the world, hatred.