Category Archives: Alice’s Blog

Since our advisor has been gone the past few weeks, Miranda and I have been working on the second prototype. I helped sew the EL panel again. I also re soldered all the EL wires using copper tape. Hopefully, it will keep better this time. Also, we’re going to try to bend the wire outside of the connection to make it a bit stronger. Miranda also finished with the basic parts of the second prototype.

Miranda and I also spent some time putting up fliers around campus. These fliers are to help get users for our user study. We’ve gotten one call …

Now that we have the first prototype done, our advisor has been working on getting IRB approval for our user study. We hope to write a paper for CHI using this study. He just finished IRB this week, so now we’re waiting for approval which could take about a week.

Since then, we’ve started working on the second prototype. We’ve cut out Neoprene and Miranda has done some sewing. I’ll also be sewing the EL wire panel again as well.  We might change a few things to make this second prototype better but it will be a back up in …

In the last two weeks, we’ve really been rushing to get our prototype done so that we can take a good picture of it for our paper. We finished the circuit for the prototype about two weeks ago. I also sewed the EL wire panel. We first tried to do a continuous blue loop on the outside but it didn’t look good when it was sewed so we did something else which can be seen in the picture.

Last week, Miranda and I worked together to sew everything and actually put everything together. Miranda mostly worked with the sewing machine …

We’ve really been rushing to finish the prototype by the end of this month in the last two weeks. We decided to continue using all EL wire for the prototype since the EL tape couldn’t be cut and soldered well easily.

I tested more of the sensors in the past two weeks. Though all the sensors gave relatively consistent readings when we did 10 repetitions, the flex sensor didn’t seem to work well when we tested it over a period of time. The readings weren’t consistent. We also tried to place the flex sensor on the side of the knee …

We’ve done a lot for the prototype in the past few weeks especially now that Miranda is back. She’s been working on making different prototypes for our device. Right now, they’ve been made out of paper using a buckle that we printed from a 3D printer. She’ll start making an actual prototype made out of neoprene this week.

Last week, I spent time testing the bend sensor that Halley made. I tested the device on Miranda this time. They did give relatively consistent results, but they also created an interesting pattern when it was turned into a graph:

I tested …

Now that summer has started and spring classes have ended, I’ve had more time to work and be in the lab. For the past two weeks, I’ve been soldering EL wire and testing sensors. I met with Katie to talk about summer plans two weeks ago and we decided that we needed to get the prototype done by the end of summer. We also want to be able to submit another paper and if we have time, do an interface for the physical therapist.

I spent the first week soldering the end of cut EL wires from the part that …

The past few weeks have been really busy with school and research. Since school just ended, I ended up taking a lot of time out to study for finals and such. I’ll have more time though now that it’s the summer.

In the past few weeks, I created a very, very simple website that simply holds the information. I don’t have enough knowledge to make it look good yet though. I’ve also been practicing a lot with android. I’ve gotten a lot better at understanding how to develop with android as well as how to understand code. Even so, we …

In the past two weeks, I’ve looked at some more Android things as well as met with Swamy to work out the interface for our device. I read up more on the USB host mode for Android. I also looked at some more code.

In my meeting with Swamy this week, we talked about what the home screen will look like for both the patient as well as the physical therapist. After some discussion, we decided that instead of an Android application, we might provide the physical therapist with something they can use on the computer, such as a web …

In the past two weeks, I’ve been researching the battery charger for our lithium ion battery as well as starting to learn some Android development. For the battery, we learned that our charger only has the basic function of charging the battery. Sparkfun does provide other boards that provide more options, however the boards seem a bit too big for our project. At first, I researched boards that would be able to tell us the amount of charge in the battery, however, this isn’t a big concern since we can just use another device to check the juice. One of …

Last week was spring break so we had a small pause with the research.

Before that, I worked more on the circuitry. I created a code which I posted last time but I hadn’t made the circuit yet. Before spring break, I tried to create a circuit for the code using the Arduino Uno Board. I still need to figure out how the mini board works before I use that. I’ll meet with Swamy tomorrow to figure out how to continue. I have the circuit, but it doesn’t seem to be working as it should be. The circuit will light …