International audienceThis paper studies existing design methods for designing assistive devices. Publications discussing how to select a design method when designing for disabled people are rare. However, designers do design for disabled people and researchers do publish these case-studies. The aim of this paper is to extract the underlying design methods from design cases. Sixteen case-studies presenting the design of assistive device have been analyzed. A table summarizes the design methods identified in the case-studies. Unusual methods are described. Then, each method is discussed. Results show that user-Centred Design (UCD) tools are widely used for designing assistive device. UCD approach is expected to be helpful but evidences are lacking. Recently, some authors have adapted existing tools outside the disability world to use them in the context of design projects for disabled people (ABAB design, AD SWOT and AD TOWS and Fitts' law). More investigations of these tools would be needed to be able to evaluate their benefits and weaknesses. In addition, tools coming from the rehabilitation field have been reused by designers (joint range and muscle force measure, and psycho-motor tests). Since, those tools were created initially to measure disabled people's abilities, they seem totally relevant for designers in the disability field
International audienceThis article aims to identify the difficulties that may arise when designing assistive devices for disabled children. Seventeen design projects involving disabled children, engineering students, and special schools were analysed. A content analysis of the design reports was performed. For this purpose, a coding scheme was built based on a review of the literature. This was then improved through direct observation of the design reports. The coding scheme includes 17 categories, 7 of which stemmed from the direct observation of the reports: these 7 categories cover newly identified difficulties. Three important aspects emerged from the content analysis: (1) Difficulties identified in the literature arose in the context of this study. (2) Among the difficulties related to the practical barriers of involving disabled children, one new difficulty in particular was identified through the study, that is, that of partnering with special schools. (3) While existing literature focuses on the practical barriers, the results of this study show that not all difficulties are related to these barriers. In fact, understanding user needs proves to be especially difficult when the product to be designed targets several different disabled users
Purpose:The aim of this study was to improve the design of an interface to help disabled children to play a musical instrument. This involved integrating human motion capture in the design process.
Method:The participant performed twenty pointing movements towards four selected locations. Three one-way analyses of variance (ANOVA) were performed in order to determine the most efficient input location. For each button position, (1) the Reaction Time (RT), (2) the Movement Time and (3) the spatial variability of the movements were compared.
Results:The results obtained for RT and MT revealed that one of the positions was the best button location for producing efficient movements.
Conclusions:As the case study showed, combining a 3D motion capture system with statistical analysis helped the designers to develop their design methodology and make crucial choices.
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