Empathise
This year in secondary two, we experienced community education. During community education, we went to Filos Community Services, at 38 Chai Chee Avenue. We went along with a few volunteers to visit the elderly at the Chai Chee community. Through our interactions with the elderly, we got to better know them. For example, we found out about what they do daily, what is most important to them and what they value most. Most of the elderly we talked to mentioned that they spend half their days sleeping and they do not actually have much to do other than bathing and eating. We think that what is most important to the elderly is surviving, because they seem to value health a lot, as can be seen from how they do not use much salt and oil when they prepare their meals. They also value their family, and they greatly appreciate it when their family visits them, even just for a short while. Most importantly, we learnt more about the challenges elderly face in their daily lives. One of the elderly we visited, a 91 year old man living in a 1 room flat, mentioned that he had troubles with hearing and seeing. As such, he does not frequently check his messages and he did not even realise when his phone malfunctioned, the text being reversed so that it cannot be read easily. His body is also very frail, and hence he does not leave his home often. Even when he does go out to buy groceries or for other reasons, he has to use a wheelchair. The elderly are also very bored, being cooped up in their houses all day with no source of entertainment to occupy their time with.
Define
From conversing with the elderly, we found out more about the challenges they face, in terms of mobility, health, and entertainment. For mobility-related issues, we think that assisting them with their mobility would enable them to move around freely and they would in turn gain more freedom and joy from being able to go to the places they like. We can also provide them with entertainment to prevent them from losing purpose and motivation in their lives, which may result in depression. Among all these problems we have identified, we believe the health-related issues of the elderly are most worrying. This is because health is vital to them and living a healthy lifestyle is very crucial to longer lifespan. Hence, we think that the health-related issues the elderly face are far more pressing. While talking to an elderly man in his late sixties, we found out that he had to take a lot of medicine. From there, we remembered that a Filos helper was telling us about some difficulties that the elderly have with taking medication. They would sometimes forget about taking it, or take insufficient medicine, resulting in under dose, which is the lesser of 2 sins, for they may also take the medication, but forget that they already took it, hence retaking it. This is dangerous as it may lead to an overdose of medicine, causing illness and maybe even death. Thus, we think that by allowing them to take their medication with more ease and convenience, it would help them remember better and prevent such incidents from happening so often.
Ideate
Before we decided to create a product that would solve some health-related issues of the elderly, we thought of some things we could do in the entertainment, mobility and environment field. For entertainment, we originally thought we could create an app that entertains the elderly, for them to pass time if they were bored. However, we decided not to do that as creating an app on our own would be a bit out of our ability. We do not have the resources and skill to do so. We also thought of making a card or board game for the elderly to play together so that they can socialise and not just remain cooped up in their houses. However, we thought that might be a bit too common. For mobility, there are already wheelchairs with many special features assisting the elderly so there would not be much for us to do. For environment, we thought it would be pretty tough to make something to help in that field. Hence, we chose the health module as it seemed the simplest to us. We then decided on creating a product that would allow the elderly to take their medicine with more ease and convenience. We want our product to also be able to remind them to take the correct amount of medicine daily on time, and alert their caretakers should the elderly forget. Thus, we decided on making a medicine box with sliders, which would help the elderly take their medicine more easily. The medicine box would have a buzzer which sounds and lights up when the elderly have to take their medicine. The buzzer would also alert caretakers if the elderly do not take their medicine after 6 hours, in case they still forget even after the buzzer or if they did not hear or see. The medicine box’s tabs would also have Braille on them, to accommodate its uses to the visually impaired. Even though the community we serve can see perfectly fine, we want our product to not only be useful to our community, but to the people of the general population. Along with the Braille, our boxes would have different shapes printed on them, to reflect on the shapes presented and shown in the microbit when it is their time to take their medicine. This is to help prevent the elderly from taking medicine from the wrong compartment. We have no way to completely prevent them from pulling on the wrong compartments, but this is the best that we can do with our abilities.
Create
We originally wanted to 3D print our product out, so it could be possible for mass production. But when we went to the maker space to see the 3D printer, Ms Gayle told us that it could be done with the Carvey CNC Router, which carves out shapes in wood much faster than human hands could. The next time we went to see her, she taught us how it works. It was extremely interesting to see that NYGH has these sort of machines for us students to use, unlike most other schools. Before the next visit, our group made a prototype of the prototype, or what we like to call a proto-prototype, using cardboard for Ms Gayle to understand what we were doing. Afterwards, we were still a bit confused, so we used the proto-prototype, now proto-proto-prototype to create a proto-prototype using mdf to understand how our pieces would come together. It was a success. Next, we worked on the real prototype. But, we encountered many problems. The carvey did not carve everything out, and we had to knife it out, but we were a little too rough with one of the pieces, causing it to break, we had to use tape to fix it. Later on, we found out that one of the pieces was too small, luckily it was to broken one. Hence we had to re carve another one. But, that was not the end of our troubles, after the PCTD, some of our group mates went to check on our pieces, wanting to sand it, but they found out that one of the pieces was missing. Currently, we are going to re look around the maker space for the piece, and if we still cannot find it, we will have to re carve another one, which would be extremely unfortunate.
Test
On the last day of our community education journey, we talked to a Filos volunteer, Christina, a bit about our product. She raised a lot of issues with our product so we decided to modify our prototype a bit. Our original idea was to just install a buzzer which sounds and lights up to remind the elderly to take their medicine at the correct time. However, Christina informed us that the elderly might not hear the buzzer sounding or see it lighting up. This cannot be helped as our product is targeted to our community which can see and hear well, but we decided to use Braille on the tabs of the medicine box, to cater to the visually impaired. At first, our product only had the different days written out on the tabs but after Christina mentioned that the elderly might have trouble reading and they might pull out the wrong tab and take the wrong medicine, we decided to draw out different shapes that are less similar to each other on the tabs, for the elderly to differentiate the different compartments. The different shapes will be cross for Monday, square for Tuesday, star for Wednesday, circle for Thursday, triangle for Friday, heart for Saturday, and arrow for Sunday. Just in case, we also decided to program the buzzer to alert caretakers if the elderly do not take their medicine after 6 hours, as this might mean that they have forgotten or something has happened to them. As we do not have to make a perfect product that includes all of these functions in, we decided to just create a prototype for the medicine box which includes the tabs, but the buzzer and its functions will just be included in the board under accessories. We hope that this modifying would make our product more accommodating to the different communities.
