Kinesis Masters

So it’s been a rough week. Only 10 days left for the last deliverable and we are still behind, but working as much as we can. This past week we’ve been working separately (but together) on the physical part of the sole and the functional part. This last one has been super hard to do, since none of us really has full domain on Arduino. But anyways, Arian and I have been trying to figure out how and what to write on the code so when we are ready we have to just assemble everything, which is easy to do since all of the sensors bring hook up guides. Today we have more lights on how to do it, having almost all the rough coding ready – we just have to add a couple more lines to completely fulfill what our sole has to do. Here’s what each one of our electronics has to do:

• Vibration motor: This is for the bracelet to vibrate. It should be hooked up to the pro micro on this bracelet to receive the information from the radio frequency transmitter on the sole, so when the parameters we set are achieved, it vibrates.
• Radio Frequency Transmitter: Its goal is to send the information from the pro micro in the soles to the one in the bracelet, to make it vibrate when it’s supposed to from the parameters we set.
• Force Sensitive Resistors: First, make them “map” what kind of foot it is (supinator, normal, pronator) comparing the pressure it’s made in the different specific spots they’re located in the sole; then, detect the inversion and eversion movements of the foot (for this set dangerous ranges of weight and time of these movements for each kind of foot, a supinator foot is a little bit more inverted -or a lot more inverted- than a normal foot, so it doesn’t have the same parameters as a normal foot). 
• Accelerometer: To detect that the person is walking. Only here is when the code for the FSRs and everything will be working. If he or she’s sitting down of course it shouldn’t work. This sensor we have is actually a magnetometer and a gyro too – this last one has the ability to detect pitch, roll and yaw, so it could help us detecting inversion and eversion if we mix its functionality with the pressure sensors.

This week is going to be very busy, but we hope that we’ll be ready soon.

 

We are 17 days away from our last deliverable, which is presenting our completely functional prototype. These past days, we planned how we are going to proceed – and our main challenge now is the electronic part. We’ve been working on how to make the sole work and its feasibility, and after consulting some teachers and people who actually know about arduino, we bought everything we need and started to work on the code. For now, we bought sensors for only one sole, since we haven’t actually tried or checked if it actually works, so for this upcoming week it’s going to be what we are going to do.

Last week we were working on the 3D model for the soles and the bracelet. We also started planning our final presentation  and bought the electronics we need to program the final prototype.

This week we will make our RTV mold for the soles and the bracelet we designed. We will use a MDF sole and bracelet for the process shown in the following video:

Filling these molds with polyurethane and silicone we will have a prolix prototype.

The end of Dilab is coming, so we have to start prototyping the final product. We know that we need a mold to make the soles with a plastic injection process. To make this mold we need a model of the final sole and it has to be perfect.

We decided to make a 3D model of the sole to cut it on MDF later. The process for modeling it starts with a real 3D sole using Autodesk Remake. This program allow us to have an exact copy of a sole from an elder’s shoe. Now we have to design the external sole considering where the electronics will go and how it will adapt to the shoe.

We hope our plan woks!

 

This week we have been working on the sole mold to make the sole look like the final one. So we started with our first plan which consisted in doing a plasticine mold and then adding silicone to get a prototype of the sole.

 

Unfortunately it did not work, so we made a second plan. We tried to make a sole with different materials (silicone, expanded polystyrene and fiberglass) to have a more stable sole. This was a really bad plan and did not work.

Our final plan was succesful. It consisted in doing a MDF mold covered with plasticine. We used  it to get a better silicone sole. After this we painted it with black spray.

The results were not the best ones, but it was an advance to know how we will continue our idea of making a mol for the sole.

This week we tested, using the protocol, our two mockups: the sole and the presure sensors.

Sole

We tested the sole in uneven floors to see how the material adapts. Also we tried different possitions to se how the sole adapts to stay attached to the shoe. From these tests we got that the material can adapt very good to the floor. Unfortunately, the sole does not stay atached to the shoe all the time, so we have to try other design or material for the insertion.

An other test we made for the sole was talking with a physician and 6 elders. They told us what they thought about our idea and gave us some feedback. The physician helped with his knoledge about how shoes work and the dimensions the sole needs. Also he talked about how we should do the programing for the sensors considering the foot positions. The elders gave us their opinion about if they would feel safer using our product. They liked the idea of preventing sliding and being more stable. Suming ups this test, we have to make the sole thiner to prevent the user losing contact with the floor and less jelly to keep feets stable.

Sensors

For the sensors we had to make home made presure sensors because the real ones are too expensive. We used a water sistem to test if the sensors would detect different positions. We found out that even though the shoe’s soles do not give precise information to the sensors as feet do, the different sensors detect the movements and do not stay in the same level.

With this results now we can start trying with real presure sensors in the sole.

Testing results:

So for this week, we have to test our first mockups, all this in order to get feedback and start building our first prototype. It’s been hard, since what we want to do for the sole, requires a material that it’s more expensive and that we want to save instead of just using it for the mockup, so we’ve been trying to imitate it. For the ones that we are going to use, we decided on three parameters for testing of the sole itself: comfortability (thickness/material/adaptability to shoe), safety (does it make the user feel safe) and functionality (test in rocks, level changes on the floor, others). For the part of the sensor, after speaking to a physician about the dangerous position of the feet that could make a person fall, we realized we should try the sensors with him so he can tell us if the parameters are right.

So that’s the plan, the testing should begin tomorrow and we’ll see how it all works out.

Ph: first couple of mockups that we built.

This week we had to present our first mockups of our solution. The feedback we got was that what we had was not enoght to start testing. The different soles we made were not useful and did not show what we want to test.

So we desided to make new testeable mockups of the sole and start trying to program the sensors that will go inside the sole. We used silicone and expanded polystyrene and made a sole using a real shoe. We think this mockup of the sole can work for a first test with specialists and elders. Now we have to work with the sensors.

We will see how the week goes.

As we are working with an international team, it’s been kind of hard to set schedules and to organize everything in general, but this week Arian, Tuomas and Rodrigo came to Chile to work together in the prototypes. We spent the whole week going to the workshop, trying different materials for our soles. With this, we created our testing protocol for the different mock ups we made, like comfortability of the sole (thickness, material), different aspects of the bracelet and sensors. For these last ones, we are trying different sensors that could work for our project, like inclination, pressure, gyros and accelerometers. After trying these first two, we decided to buy an accelerometer for Arduino with a gyro included, so that’s the next step for our mockups.

This week Arian arrived to Chile and we started working with him in mockups. We tried three different concepts of muckups: sole material, electronic components and the alarm device. We decided that our alarm device will be a bracelet that will have a vibrator and the material for the sole will be polyurethane because of it’s physical properties. Our mockups for the sole are not made of this material but we are testing different dimensions.

Our plan now is to find the best way to make our sole adapt to elders shoes. Also we have to figure out how we will put the electronic devices in the sole and keeping them protected from breaking when the elder walks.