Cati Vaucelle
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Hapbit (in progress) with Adam Boulanger. Help from Dana Gordon, Maggie Liu and Paula Te.
Garments to modulate neurological function in brain diseased patient.
Research Questions: What are the shared plasticity mechanisms between auditory, visual, and haptic stimulation? Beyond biology, what if a device could provide temporally grounding sensory stimulation in a patient's environment, customized by the patient's input?
Design and Implementation of New Medical Devices, Customizing Treatment in Situated Environments.
Context: One critical challenge for designers and scientists alike is the integration of new research findings into tools that challenge existing silos between patients, their environment, and clinical intervention as it is currently practiced.
Hap-bit is an ambitious new project to rethink the form and function of Parkinson's treatment. Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects motor function, with symptoms in gait, speech, tremor, hesitation and eventually arrested movement. However, Parkinson's is becoming an amazing platform to research sensory integration, as visual and auditory stimulation have been shown to synchronize neural timing networks to rehabilitate lost motor function.
The neuroscientific questions are: how do different sensory mechanisms support rehabilitation, what are the shared plasticity mechanisms between auditory, visual, and haptic stimulation? Beyond biology, what if a device could provide temporally grounding sensory stimulation in a patient's environment, customized by the patient's input? How would one design such a tool, questioning a user's relationship to treatment, to their disease, and measuring both the clinical and social outcomes?
Design: We are designing a new generation of medical devices that empower users to modulate their own neurologic function while engaging in innovative and validated novel interventions. This project has components across disciplines, including: design, medical devices, neuroscience, EE, mech-E, materials science, ethnography, and software.
Approach: We research on seamless sensory interventions via a series of haptic devices embedded in garments, designed to deliver stimuli to modulate neurological function in brain diseased patients.
Materials: New materials shift boundaries between form and function, allowing fields as diverse as fashion and clinical intervention to directly impinge upon one another’s applications.
Printed model, February 2009
3D rendered model, January 2009
3D rendered model (model 2), January 2009
Low fidelity prototypes, January 2009
Interaction sketches, January 2009
Test with solenoid, December 2008
Hap-Bit Low Fi-prototypes, December 2008
