Welcome to the 1st Exhibition of Group 24! We are Brit, Ruixuan and Xavière. 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
