My goal was to redesign a past fashion project in order for it to be shown during Boston Fashion Week 2015. I worked on a conceptual dress designed for a world with little oxygen. A worldwide drought could kill all of hte oxygen producing plants on the planet, forcing humans to conserve oxygen. People could fill up external lungs on the dress with oxygen and then they would be able to live without more air for a lot longer than if they did not have the dress. Since I worked on a project that had already been started I was not creating a completely new piece, but instead redesigning the original. I started off by sketching out what I wanted the dress to look like, and then began to create the dress.

The lung dress is made of silver painted would with two moving acrylic lungs, and two non-movable lungs. The main part of the dress is made of silver wood strips and pentagons that are attached to create a tube-like structure. Elastic is strung on the pieces to create the outer shape of the tubes. There is a movable lung on the front of the dress, as well as one on the side. Both of the lungs have servos inside of them that allow them to expand and contract. On the back of the dress there is a non-movable lung that houses the battery and Arduino to control the servos, and on the other side of the dress is another non-movable lung. When the lungs expand, the elastic stretches out, bringing the whole dress to life. When the wearer of the dress walks, it appears as though the lungs move less than they do when the dress is stationary. The change in speed is just an illusion, but it makes it seem as though the dress is reacting to movement. The lung dress is not completely finished, but it shows what the final dress could look like.

This project was begun during NuVu's Futuristic Fashion Studio (themed around Science Fiction) by Adriana Hrabowych and Zoe Zelleke, and continued by Myles Lack-Zell during the month preceding Boston Fashion Week.

The purpose of the Screw Box Reacher is to help anyone who comes to Nuvu and is handicapped. Our device will help them reach different screws at difficult heights without spilling the entire screw box. This circuited reacher grabs onto the screw box with a front clamp and then as somone pulls it out a motorized wheel places a track to stabilize the box so it wont spill.

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.