Tag Archives: app

Rocking chair trial begins

For the first time today, we are testing out the soundscape interactive rocking chair at Deerhurst, following our successful trials at Westbury Fields during the Tangible Memories project. We have six residents, relatives and staff who are all looking forward to sitting, rocking, listening and imagining, for a half hour relaxation session in the Garden Room.

As a recap, to summarise this tech-embedded piece of furniture, here is our poster from the recent Computer-Human Interaction conference in San Jose:

RockingChair-v03
Rocking chair poster presented at CHI 2016, a computer-human interaction conference focussing on ‘technology for good’. (Dr Peter Bennett, Heidi Hinder, Dr Kirsten Cater)

Designed for older people living with the advanced stages of dementia, the rocking chair plays sounds from the natural world, nature-themed poetry and music through speakers embedded in the headrest. The audio is triggered by the rocking motion of the chair, so the sitter doesn’t have to learn or remember an interaction. If the chair stops rocking, then the poems, music or nature sounds gradually fade away to quiet. The sound content plays at random, removing the onus of choice from the individual, and the associated anxiety and frustration of sometimes not being able to recall personal preferences.

Our first participant today was assisted into the rocking chair from a wheelchair, with the help of care staff and a hoist. As she listened to sounds of the dawn chorus and waves on the seashore, she asked me what was causing the rocking movement of the chair. When I told her that it was her legs, pushing herself back and forth in the chair, she was surprised but very pleased – she told me that she can’t walk. While we have largely focused on the emotional and well-being effects of the rocking chair, it seems we have underestimated the potential physical benefits as well!

There were two other highlight responses from today as well as this significant start. A lady called Thelma had felt very agitated and anxious before she joined us in the Garden Room to try out the rocking chair. By the time she left to go to lunch, she was smiling and happy, and seemed very uplifted by her experience.

thelma-roberts-3_small

Thelma said she loved the music the most (more than the poetry or nature sounds), and she rocked in time with the rhythm of the music that she was listening to. She told me that she didn’t want the music to finish and at the end, repeatedly commented on how ‘that was so lovely’ and thanked me so much for the experience. She was moved to tears, telling me ‘oh, I could cry, that was just lovely’. Bidding goodbye, Thelma shook my hands in both of hers and kissed the back of my hand as she thanked me again.

Another instance that seemed to illustrate the uplifting effects of the chair, was demonstrated by a lady called Joyce who joined us in the Garden Room in tears and was very sad and upset at the start. After sitting in the rocking chair, listening to birdsong, and to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Joyce began to relax and started chatting to me (about music, her father, and how she liked instruments). She recognized Wordworth’s Daffodils poem and quoted some lines from it as she was listening. She was able to sing along with several lines of ‘Let There Be Love’. She left the session seeming much happier than she was at the beginning.

joyce-mealing-smiling_small

Here at Deerhurst, like at the Oncology Centre, I also shared a selection of natural objects with the residents, to see which items they were drawn to pick up and handle for the different tactile qualities.
natural-materials-collection-of-objects sharing-natural-objects

This feedback will contribute to artist Steve Symons’ decision-making with regards to which materials he will use to design and produce a handheld interactive prototype for residents to pick up and play.

From this box of objects, Joyce chose the rubber, the bamboo spoon and the silver birch birdcall whistle. With the spoon and the birch-whistle in hand, Joyce enjoyed tapping these two pieces of wood together, in time to the music she was listening to while rocking in the chair.joyce-mealing-hands-holding-materials_small

As well as the many positive and encouraging responses from today’s participants, it was equally useful to observe aspects of the chair and app design that will need to improve in future developments of this initial prototype. For example, Thelma found it difficult to hear many of the softer nature sounds such as the cat purring, the sound of waves on the seashore or the crickets singing. It might be that this range of sounds is too subtle for those who are hard of hearing and, in future, we could reduce the number of these types of tracks – although some people do find them relaxing and calming, as these particular sounds have a similar effect to white noise, and they seem to help people fall asleep. Volume is also an issue. Residents have very different levels of hearing and the volume needs to be adjusted for each individual, then sometimes adjusted again within each track as a piece of music will suddenly get louder or dwindle away to a volume where people think it has stopped, if they can no longer hear it.

Overall, this first day of testing the rocking chair at Deerhurst was a very valuable experience. Each of the participants seemed to gain something positive from sitting in the chair, ranging from a restful sleep to a noticeable transition from agitation to calm, from sadness to happiness.

We look forward to returning to Deerhurst again next month and hope that we will once more see residents enjoying a sense of well-being provided by the rocking chair.

What role for care staff?

There are many things I’d do differently if I started the Tangible Memories project again tomorrow. Perhaps the most important thing I’d change however would be ensuring that we worked closely with care staff from the beginning. Our ‘gatekeepers’ were often senior managers who agreed to be involved, residents were asked if they wanted to be involved and were free to say no but care staff were never really approached at the beginning. In fact I think our focus on co-designing with residents obscured somewhat the need to work with care staff. Although contracts were signed with each home in which they agreed a member of care staff would be present in each of our sessions due to pressures of work, absent colleagues and issues related to what is considered to be ‘care work’ and what is not this very rarely happened.

In the last 6 months or so we’ve really stepped up our work with care home staff and I’ve met with managers frequently to make sure that the technologies we leave with them at the end of the project aren’t left on a shelf gathering dust. There are real challenges for managers in making time for care staff to do the one to one and group work with residents that we’re advocating for. This throws up all kinds of questions about what ‘care’ means and what the expectations are of someone who works as a carer in a residential home for older people.

In light of our realization of the importance of involving and working closely with care staff ‘on the ground’ we have been working with Alive! activities to design a process of working alongside care staff to introduce them to one of our prototypes – an app for storytelling. Last week up to 3 members of staff from each of our care homes came down to the university to be introduced to some of the techniques they might use.

Today Gill Roberts from Alive! activities and myself visited one of our settings to meet with care staff who had been given an ipad to help us test out our prototype storytelling app. Although the 3 members of staff had gone away from our session at the University fired up and ready to try the app with residents we found when we arrived that they’d not managed to find time to test the app with residents and they’d had various problems with using the ipad as well as with feeling confident enough to approach a resident to ask them to speak about their lives. Challenges were expressed and noted as, for instance: What questions can you ask? How do you invite residents to speak? How do you listen carefully to residents being comfortable with silence and allowing time for thought? How might you enable residents to use the technology themselves if they are able?

There is much work to be done here as we approach the end of the grant. Ensuring we do this collaboratively with care staff and residents will be the key to sustainability of the co-designed technologies in the care home settings.IMG_0171

Testing the rocking chair prototype

A few weeks ago, we met with the Deputy Care Manager of the specialist dementia home that we are working with, in order to discuss the possibility of testing out our therapeutic rocking chair in situ, with some of the residents.

After some very useful conversations about health and safety, in perspective with positive risk-taking to ensure quality of life, we walked around the communal areas of the home, to choose a suitable location for the rocking chair to be situated on the initial test day.

There is a lovely ‘Garden Room’ in the care home which is not often used by the residents, partly due to the slightly foreboding approach of this long corridor:

Corridor to Garden Room

Once there however, the space is sunny and peaceful, and as its name suggests, the Garden Room overlooks a wide lawn, edged by plants, bird tables, a water fountain and flowerbeds:

GARDEN_ROOM_01

The natural place for the therapeutic rocking chair was in front of the French doors, so that residents could enjoy the view of the garden, while listening to music, poetry or sounds from nature, such as the dawn chorus, the wind in the treetops or crickets singing on a summer’s evening:

Rocking chair in window

On the test day, the rocking chair was trialed by eight residents and four care staff. It was very touching to watch their reactions and witness some delightful responses, not only to the chair itself as a novel item of furniture in the home, but also to the varying sound content triggered by the rocking motion and movement.

One resident, a former pilot, spent some time to begin with, exploring the surface of the chair through touch, commenting that it was like being in the cockpit of an aeroplane. Then, listening carefully to the different sounds emitting from the speakers embedded in the rocking chair’s headrests, she identified a woodpecker and an owl’s call among the chorus of birdsong, and she even cooed back to the owl in reply. As she heard the rhythmic sound of someone walking on snow, she lifted her legs up and down in time, keeping apace with them, and describing a vivid story to us about what was happening in her imagination: ‘The farmer’s on his way…’

Later in the day, we decided to adjust the sensitivity of the app so that it would trigger the sound from much more subtle movements, in order to correspond to the level of strength and capability in some of the residents. Where their own physical co-ordination had deteriorated, residents were passively rocked by a member of staff who moved the chair on their behalf. One resident was only able to activate the sound content via the app when holding my iPhone in her hand, and making small gestures to keep it moving and playing.

As a result, alongside the interactive rocking chair, we are planning to develop a handheld object-based version of the app, by embedding an iPhone into a tactile object, such as a foam ball, that could be used for armchair exercises for older people in care homes. Continuous movement of the object would similarly trigger sounds, music or poems, combining light muscle activity with a spontaneous audio experience.

On the test day, not all the residents seemed to recognise that sound was triggered by movement through the rocking motion, or necessarily to register that sound was playing at all, but this did not seem to matter. At some level, all the residents appeared to benefit from, and engage with the therapeutic rocking chair experience, even if it was simply to snooze in the sunshine, or relax and enjoy the new position overlooking the garden.

Noreen rocking CU

We look forward to developing our prototype over the next few months!

A Therapeutic Rocking Chair

Following on from our pop-up exhibition of audio stories, produced from our winter visit to the MShed (see Memories and Museums) we have been developing another auditory experience using chairs, and inspiration drawn from venturing outdoors. Here I introduce the concept of a therapeutic rocking chair for older people with dementia.

Early on in the Tangible Memories project, we recognised that access to the outdoors, and specifically to the natural world, was very limited for many care home residents, often due to a decline in their physical mobility, or particularly if they were suffering from the more advanced stages of dementia. Equally, when we asked ourselves as a team, ‘what would we want in a care home of the future?’, we identified the simple routine of being able to go outside and experience the elements as something that would be of great importance to us all.

So throughout the project, we have been seeking different ways to incorporate aspects of life outside the care home environment into our technologies and prototypes, for those who are not able to venture out independently, or as often as they might like.

To begin with, we explored virtual travel using the Oculus Rift VR headset (see Virtual Reality Storytelling), with 360˚ stitched photographs of local places and museums:

SWNS_ARAB_ROOM_11small
Example of one of the 360˚ photographs for use in the Oculus Rift headset. The technology provides an opportunity for virtual visits to museums and other local places.

We also offered VR experiences using moving imagery, sending residents to a virtual Tuscan villa, up in a hot air balloon, and even into the solar system on an animated space journey. Closer to home, we had previously recorded a kind of video postcard that reflects on the beauty of springtime in the countryside:

In this short film, as we focused on the many calming and uplifting effects of nature, such as birdsong or the sound of a river, we felt that adopting such a therapeutic approach would be particularly beneficial to residents living in the specialist dementia care home. Anxiety, agitation and memory loss are recurring symptoms of advanced dementia, so rather than placing the onus on an individual to remember past realities, we wondered whether it would prove more positive to provide an evocative soundscape of the natural world, without visual stimuli, where a person’s imagination could wander freely, and enjoy fact or fiction, in a peaceful listening experience.

With this in mind, the concept of a therapeutic rocking chair evolved, and was partly in response to Pete Bennett’s brilliant Resonant Bits harmonic user interface. This app triggers sound content on an iPhone or an iPad using a kind of rocking movement from simple subtle gestures and a slow meditative motion response. In his research, Pete asks:

How can interfaces support slow and meditative interaction in a fast paced world?  How would it feel to be able to ‘tune in’ and interact directly with digital ‘bits’ of data?

Thinking about the meditative field recordings that I had already captured from nature, and wanting to combine these with Pete’s app to create a calming user experience and interaction, the traditional rocking chair seemed like an appropriate medium for a therapeutic listening experience, simply by embedding some speakers in the headrests. Rocking chairs can be a familiar item of furniture for many older people, the type of chair which provides an opportunity to dwell, ponder and relax, with its motion considered to be very comforting. (Perhaps why babies and young children are typically rocked to sleep).

In essence, this therapeutic rocking chair would play calming, comforting sound content triggered by the rocking motion. The soundscapes of nature, poetry or music would fade away and change track as the rocking motion stops and starts again, making the interaction as simple and intuitive as possible. (The chair would be silent when it was not moving). Here’s a quick demo, using just the app on an iPhone:

The rocking chair would offer this spontaneous and relaxing listening experience through hidden stereo speakers in the headrests, connected to the Harmonic User Interface app on an iPhone.

Alongside this concept development, what a bonus it was to discover a medical study published in the American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias which cites the psychosocial and physical benefits for dementia patients who regularly rock in a platform rocking chair:

Rocking therapy study - cover page

Read the findings online here: Rocking chair therapy

The US study used traditional platform rocking chairs and their rocking motion alone as a form of therapy, which researchers found could improve balance, muscle tone, emotional well-being, and resulted in a reduction in the number of requests for medication to treat aches and pains in the majority of older people they tested.

If such results could be achieved with support and persistence, using a traditional piece of furniture, what more might we be able to offer residents by embedding therapeutic sounds triggered by the rocking motion? One of our key aims on the Tangible Memories project is to develop assistive technologies that enhance the social, personal and emotional well-being of older people, in addition to addressing their physical needs.

So I set to work, hacking an existing platform rocking chair in order to integrate stereo speakers into the headrests and create a quick iteration of our initial prototype so we could test the idea and get it working:

Table of tools mid hack_Small
Hackspace: DIY table of tools for adapting an existing platform rocking chair to incorporate stereo speakers
Rocking Chair prototype
Speakers fitted into the headrests of the rocking chair, visible from the back only. In future prototypes, these speakers would be completely hidden.

The next step required uploading an adapted version of Pete’s Harmonic User Interface app (currently called ‘SoundChair’) to my iPhone and then adding the sound content via iTunes.

SoundChair icon-02
SoundChair icon

The app can play any m4a, mp3 or aac file which is triggered by the rocking movement.

In addition to the sounds of nature, I’ve added other content known to be beneficial for dementia patients, which includes the rhythmic repetition of poetry, as well as classical music. Here are a few examples to give a flavour:

‘Sailing By’, Radio 4 shipping forecast theme:

The sound of waves on the seashore:

‘The Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth:

Next, the speakers were crudely connected to a battery power pack and my iPhone….

Rocking Chair prototype

…..and we’re ready to test it out!

Seashells by Hugh Cowling

Gather a shell from the strewn beach
And listen at its lips: they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole sea’s speech.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Sea-Limits, (1919)

After discussing and trying out various possibilities for the illustrations, we decided that sea shells (particularly conch shells) were the perfect visual metaphor for the Tangible Memories project and an ideal vehicle to trigger audio clips within the book, app or any other surface that they may appear on. You hold a shell to your ear and listen to the memory of the sea, just as memories are held within books. The rich visual qualities and the variation of different types of shell are similar to a person’s life and the memories that are collected over time, this idea became more prominent the more I studied the shells and realised just how intricate and complex they were!

Visiting the care homes and meeting the residents and carers was an integral part of this project for me. I was able to experience the fundamental notion of the Tangible Memories project first-hand; communication and the sharing and recording of memories. The process of recording people’s memories and stories, whether it be through writing, taking a photo or audio recording engages both the resident and the listener. Listening to people’s stories and memories was hugely inspirational and being able to preserve these memories in a tangible way is fantastic! I am delighted that I was able to contribute to this project.

Hugh Cowling

www.hughcowling.co.uk