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Teddy Augmented Reality Ambulance Assistant / Student Project

Submitted By Claire Puginier

Description

In hospital care and transport, a patient’s health and well-being are not determined solely by the quality of medical intervention, but are also influenced by mental, emotional, and social factors. ‘Teddy’ is an augmented reality experience that utilizes human-computer interaction to alleviate stress and emotional trauma, focusing specifically on the context of children in emergent transport. Within the augmented reality, Teddy, the AI paramedic bear accompanies and provides children in ambulances with emotional support, reassurance, and distraction allowing us to alter their perceived environment. The physical design of the AR glasses additionally
supports the paramedic in their task of monitoring the patient’s vital signs using biometrics, and establishing pain levels and patient responsiveness through motion tracking. Through verbal and physical interactions and prompts, the AI of Teddy refines its own patient-specific dialogue structure by developing and synthesising knowledge about the patient and their condition. The digital manipulation of environmental psychology informed by an interactive AI is what makes this a unique approach to HCI and research-by-design.

Technical Challenge

To conduct user testing, we needed to find a viable medium through which to communicate our mixed reality.  Experimenting with programs including Unity, Photoshop, After Effects, and diverse Panorama viewers we designed prototypes in virtual reality. Using a 360-degree grid, we prototyped our wireframe sketches as virtual realities. This helped us make initial decisions on the positioning, scale, and visibility of the AI character. These wireframes additionally provided a basis for later user testing. Using cardboard VR headsets and 360 photos of our film set, we were able to place Teddy into the virtual environment and begin user testing. Our main interest was to observe how children responded to Teddy, and how easily they were able to comprehend the 360 technology. Additionally we tested how much of the natural ambulance environment was being perceived and remembered with and without the presence of Teddy. By interviewing and testing the headsets with both children and their parents we were able to gather valuable insights from two of our primary stakeholder groups.

Teddy Augmented Reality Ambulance Assistant

https://www.clairepuginier....

Client

Student Project

Media

Design

Market

Technology

Credits

Designer

Cody Reppert
Jhaolin Cai
Claire Puginier

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