Alba: A Period Detection Wipe for the Visually Impaired

“How might we connect the voices in Taiwan and HK, and make them interactive and impactful?”

Designed for portable, uninterrupted monitoring during in-hospital transport and at the bedside, IntelliVue X3 provides an intuitive smart-phone-style operation that quickly and easily enables continuous monitoring during transport for the most critical patients.

More than ever, young people are raising their voices on issues they care about. From Extinction Rebellion to FridaysForFuture, there’s a worldwide movement of children getting involved in activism. This new generation have opened our eyes to the power of children’s voices – showing us that they should be our role models. They’ve made it clear that for human life on Earth to continue, we all need to make big changes.

The project “Everyday Sounds of Dementia” aims to research the potential of sound and soundscapes in design of technology and services for people living with dementia. Research has demonstrated the cognitive and psychological benefits of music for people with dementia. In the Everyday Sounds of Dementia project, we further expand this body of knowledge by exploring the role of everyday sounds or non-musical ordinary sounds in evoking memories and conversations to provide meaningful social activity for people with dementia and their relatives. However, most audio-based technologies are inaccessible or difficult to use for people with dementia due to cognitive and physical disabilities. This project contributes to the positive well-being and quality of life of people living with dementia, and their caregivers, by supporting day-to-day functioning in their homes, and during times of transition to higher levels of care. It uses design-research and participatory approaches to develop interactive soundscapes (collages of everyday ambient sounds ) to calm, reduce agitation, stimulate, excite and engage people living with dementia in times of anxiety, stress or boredom, and promote meaningful activity in high-risk situations. The insights of this project have resulted in the Tumbler prototype, which is an accessible sound player for people with dementia to play everyday sounds and provide meaningful sound-based activity at home.

Vochlea is a revolutionary project to enable easy capture and expression of musical ideas. Expressing an idea is all about converting a thought into something that can be communicated to and understood by someone else. When it comes to music we are all capable of composition in our head, but few of us are able to outwardly express this music.

In the midst of its worst drought in 500 years, designers in Smart Design’s San Francisco studio decided to help by designing a product that effectively influences residential conservation, reduces an individual’s water footprint, and adds meaningful value to people’s daily conservation efforts.

Being a milkman has changed very little over 100 years. Operating as independent traders, customer orders are still communicated through paper notes on doormats and cash is still collected door-to- door in an ad-hoc manner. It’s labour intensive, low-tech and until now, very inefficient.

SWYP (See What You Print) radically simplifies printing by giving you the ability to see and manipulate, in a 1:1 scale, what the finished result will look like before you print. The underlying idea is that many common problems, including the wasting of time and paper, could be fixed by making all aspects of the printing interaction more natural, predictable and understandable.

For nearly 70 years, we have been interacting with computers using a keyboard, and for the past few decades with a mouse. With the rise of touchscreen technology and the Internet of Things, we’re long overdue for a more intuitive way to create and work with technology.

TactorBots is a haptic toolkit to empower designers to explore emotional robotic touch. It contains eight plug-and-play wearable tactor modules that render a series of social gestures driven by servo motors. Our specialized web GUI allows easy control, modification, and storage of tactile patterns to support fast prototyping. Taking emotional haptics as a “design canvas” with broad opportunities, TactorBots is the first “playground” for designers to try out various tactile sensations, feel around the nuanced connection between touches and emotions, and come up with creative imaginations.