The Golden Age of Feedback and Footwear
It’s been another busy few weeks for team Quoralis, but they were fun. We met some great people, got a lot of valuable information and we’re looking forward to the next few weeks!
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.
Our Very First User Study
As it was made very apparent during last month’s bootcamp, we absolutely needed to take a step back and talk to our potential users, and we did just that.
Through a tangled network of connections, family and friends of friends, we got in touch with a group of older people who were kind enough to let us interview them during their regular meetup at their church.
We got to interviewing them in groups of three, which took us about an hour. Each group was unique but there were definitely some common threads — all in all we got some great insights into their daily lives and what they thought the product might look like.
We couldn’t hear each other’s conversations so it was interesting sharing our experiences after we left the church. It turned out that Sheldon got a complete positive response to a particular question, whereas I got the opposite. Onto analysing the results!
Meeting Up with IoT
At the bootcamp last month it was recommended to us that we join the IoT Auckland Meetup, so naturally we did. About a week ago we joined their meetup about PyCom devices: a series of boards designed for Internet of Things applications.
It was fun (and frustrating!) to work with hardware, as neither of us are particularly experienced with it, and it was exciting to see our code working and seeing messages pop up on the screen.
The boards themselves may or may not be the best fit for our device — regardless, we had a lot of fun and it was great meeting all the awesome people there.
Progress on the Prototype
After some more code wrangling, and a variety of other tests, we managed to get a more accurate reading from our IMU development board. Currently we are just measuring horizontal movement, so the next step is to account for the foot rising and falling during each step.
We have also started putting more thought into what our device might look like and how usable it will be by our targeted audience. This means low-fidelity designs on paper and whiteboards, lots of scribbling and soon there will be iterations upon iterations of real-life prototypes made of foam, plastic, cardboard and whatever else will do the job. We can’t wait!
Catch you guys on the next one :D
