Gait Lab and Wireframes and Deadlines, Oh My!
The last few weeks have certainly felt like scenes from the Wizard of Oz. Our awesome adventure is heading towards a close as we make our way to see the wonderful Wizards of Callaghan Innovation on November 24th for judging day. Here we will reveal our final prototype and reminisce on the journey we have been on.
FallCast is a wearable technology that we are developing as part of the C-Prize competition. We aim to use this wearable to improve predictions of when a person is likely to fall, providing an opportunity to intervene before an injury occurs.
For a long time we have been wanting to formalize our testing. It is all well and good if it can get good data from walking along a couch but just how accurate is it?! This is what we set out to find out. We visited the gait lab at the Auckland University Tamaki campus. There they had a yellow brick road capable of measuring the gait characteristics of whoever walked on it. I would like to say that we adorned Dorothy’s red slippers but instead we had wires hanging off our shoes and walked in as many obscure and strange patterns as possible, similar to that of a tin man ;)
As our time was limited we prioritized doing as many of the tests as possible. This seemed like a good idea but at the end of the day we had our Mr. Lion moment! Trawling through the data we started seeing abnormalities. The data we had collected from the gait mat was different from what our device was reporting. Panic ensued. This was short lived however, as we discovered one result that was very accurate. Upon further investigation we discovered that it was one of the tests we ran at a higher sampling rate. Armed with this knowledge we plan to head back to the gait lab to run more sampling rate tests to find the sweet spot between accuracy and power consumption.
Another focus for us has been to finalise our wireframes. We have been in close correspondence with our users and are quite happy with the feedback we have gotten thus far. The biggest learning for us has been the importance of what the user wants to see. It is quite different from our expectations and it has definitely saved us from unnecessary work.
One of our bigger announcements is that we are officially a company! We started the application process and were approved and now listed on the NZ Company Directory. This is a big step for us as it confirms our commitment to what we are working on and our vision of seeing a world where older people can enjoy their golden years without the pain and hardship from having a fall.
A huge thank you to all the participants we had walk across the mat. The data has been very helpful in understanding different gait patterns.
That is all for now. We have to get cracking on with our few remaining tasks and ensure our prototype is presentation ready.
Wish us luck!
