Hi! I'm excited to share with you
our case, study on the cane game an educational tool for orientation and mobility.
My name is Ryan Louie.
So this was a multi year collaboration between HCI and assistive technology researchers at Olin College, including Professor Paul Ruvolo and myself.
We all started this work in 2017 at Olin College, in Massachusetts, and we partnered with Eric Jerman, an instructor at Perkins school for the Blind who teaches orientation and mobility skills to blind and visually impaired students.
Why do we all care about promoting orientation, mobility skills? Well, these skills are so important for individuals, because
those with better O&M skills have higher rates of employment. and their ability to perform activities of daily living are more predictive of overall life, satisfaction and psychological well being
so due to the importance of O&M to foundational life outcomes. It's important that BVI children master these skills early
but motivating children to keep learning these skills and practicing them can be challenging.
First, there's a stigma that a mobility cane can actually mark them as different than other kids.
and in addition, the students at Perkins School have multiple disabilities, which could also make focusing on practicing these skills even harder. So our partnership was born out of conversations about these challenges.
So i'll describe some of the key events in our journey of this multi-year partnership.
and discuss several design iterations that led to the development and evaluation of the final cane game system.
and also share several lessons others can take away from this case study which can be useful
to other HCI researchers who value participatory action research.
So our approach to this work was taking a participatory action research standpoint
that would enable Eric Jerman to be a Co Designer and visionary in this work.
He had already ideas about what he wanted
technology, maybe to help with, to motivate students. And as technologists, we hope to see what was possible with current technology, and we helped design around some of these games to help motivate
through this process we also sought to understand and enhance his existing strengths as an educator.
He already used fun and games to motivate his students, and we thought that cutting edge sensing technology could enhance this experience.
And so we built four prototype games as an instantiation of this idea that sensors could help to instrument motivating games for students
through an initial test at Perkins school with a handful of Eric's students, we found several mechanics that really
offered a good intrinsic motivation for students to keep focused and motivated during these lessons, and one of those was musical feedback that gave this strong motivation. And so we pushed forward with this idea where the Cane Game was our prototype that was most promising.
This prototype worked by allowing a student who sweeps their cane back and forth
to hear their preferred music as they sweep. They get this reward as they continue sweeping their came with good technique. and the system would work tracking the position of the cane and implementing these game mechanics.
But
building on this early prototype we needed to redesign this cane for long term viability, because, as action researchers we wanted to develop something that Eric could use on his own, and that required changing some of the visual sensing to something more robust, and also
making it easier to setup and use, instead of having to rely on neck harnesses and less robust attachments to the cane.
And so over the next few years we developed several types of prototypes to improve on the sensor module as well as the experience for customizing the game.
and this is our final prototype. An instructor attaches a sensor module to a student's cane, and it communicates via Bluetooth to an iPhone app, which an instructor can monitor. The iPhone. App can be connected to a speaker and plays that student's favorite music.
Let me show you how it works.
All you do is hit. Start, and it will look for this particular type of sensor module.
Okay. So it's able to connect. It gets the battery life of the the physical, the sensor.
and as I, my king, back and forth, since the motion, it just the camera angle.
Okay.
Okay. So whenever we either don't sweep for a certain period of time, or we too short the musical style
go to on it also. I'll sorry, but if you're in that.
it's not.
he said. It's the basic
Yeah, that's the basic idea that with correct cane, sweeping technique the music will play for the student.
And so by developing this more robust version. We could give give this to Eric, so that he could conduct tests on his own, and from 2018 to 2021.
He conducted tests with 28 students, introducing them to the cane game, where he felt it would be an appropriate tool for their development and motivation.
However, as we. Since we cannot be present for all these sessions. Eric, our partner, took the role as a user experience researcher and taking notes about how different students experience the game through their development, and he shared these notes with the team so that we could synthesize these detailed experiences
across our findings. And so we had 4 hypotheses about what types of students the cane game would help for.
But today i'll just share a detailed story in support of our first hypothesis, which was for students unmotivated to learn to use the cane, the cane game would increase their motivation.
And so here's a story of student Alpha.
who was someone
who, when joining Perkins, was not motivated to sweep his cane for months, despite encouragement to do so, and when
Eric tried to do lessons with him
Alpha was very inverse to physical queues, and prompts a light touch on the body or his cane could make him mad. It would often end in sessions that would just abruptly stop.
But Eric tried the Cane game on Alpha, and what he found was that Alpha quickly understood that his cane movements would cause his preferred music to play.
A huge smile broke across his face, and he was soon covering lots of ground throughout the school's hallways playing to his favorite tune, which i'll play for you here
so.
and you can just imagine him zipping down the hallways and other staff members seeing a big change
in his demeanor and clapping for this student Alpha.
and
I think it it, it's a testament to how the these personalized music and connecting his movements to that desirable feedback really could serve as a motivator for some of these kids
like Alpha.
And so what lessons did we learn throughout this journey. Well.
what does it take to center and build upon a partner's unique strengths? This is a conversation happening amongst other community-based researchers. An asset-based design, and we'd like to share some of our inisghts which
we.
Eric, was our disability expert and we respected his expertise. We let him guide us in the the journey of understanding the space, and throughout it all we remain humble and curious
to his ideas and and his insights, and in listening to him. We found unique strengths in his philosophy, such as
making a silly and enjoyable learning atmosphere, and our whole project around these games and the Cane game was leveraging technology to to enhance his existing strengths and elevate him.
And we went through multiple iterations of the system. So we could deliver our reliable and useful research artifact to Eric, and that enabled him to really benefit from this process, not just as a research prototype or as a tool that could really be integrated.
and we promoted the transferability of this technology while just working with Eric. And what how we did this was we focused on a common commonly understood use context, which are these: O&M sessions between an instructor and students.
and sharing our results around this context helps other O&M instructors understand how it would be useful.
Garnering interest we found in our current work. We've sent the Cane Game to several O&M. Instructors across the country, and they're already benefiting from the robust, robust technology and the insights we developed with Eric.
And so i'd like to encourage you to please read our paper for a detailed journey of this research partnership.
and we hope you can learn a little bit from our practice of participatory action research elevating the strengths of Eric and his students, and learning, orientation and mobility skills enabled by a cutting edge sensing technology. Thank you so much.