E10 lab final - Grade: A+ PDF

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This is a final essay for Engr10 lab. Topic is related to Ethic part of the class. Designing Across the Lifespan Assignment ...

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Phan 1

Name: TRAM PHAN May 11, 2018 Designing Across the Lifespan Assignment

Introduction In this paper, I will discuss about how to improve the interaction of the robot with multiple audiences in two stages of life: childhood and late adulthood. Understanding human development in many domains such as physical, emotional, social, and cognitive is essential to make the robot serve the users the best. As an engineer, I think it is very important to make the decision of the design base on these human development considerations. With the reflection of designing and building the robot during this semester, I will consider some issues that range from the appearance, safety, and human-robot communication. Discussion First thing that any engineer should consider is how to design the appearance of the robot effectively. For children, the appearance of the robot should be simple, friendly, colorful, creative, cheerful, and so on. According to Chiasson, many of the designs used icons that represent animals’ activities like what they eat and what they look like. This help young children (5-10 years) creating complex queries and learn more information. This aspect directly relates to how children mentally organize such information. On another hand, the robots for the elders will need a minimal and simple outlooking design also. The design can be more look like a human with bigger, simple and minimal control buttons. The letters and pictures on the designs should also be big, clear, and easy to understand. Second, for any engineering designs and for every type of users, safety issues are always the most important in my opinion. For children, the ability to acquire fast with technology is a strong point when the minds of children are still in the stage of rapid development and incomplete. But the lack of full control and self-control of children is also a drawback that designers must consider. For example, the angles of the robot should be smoothed instead of pointed or angular. Designs using battery power will be safer for children than from electricity. For the elders, one of the most attention-grabbing applications is care and nursing. And that also once again confirms the importance of the safety of robots in the physical of older people. The speed of the robot, the movements, the sizes and so on should be carefully tested in order to help the elders finish tasks that they need in safety. Lastly, human-robot communication is always a serious issue that also engineering design should be improved. For users in the stage of childhood, visual, creative, and friendly communication is necessary with the fact some of the children may not yet understand the abstract concepts. The design that help improve he imagination of the children will be very helpful for the social domain since it arouses curiosity and desire to learn. According to Meng, the communication between the elderly and robot should be simple, minimal, natural, and effective. Thanks to voice recognition technology, many elders can access the robots easier just by speaking to the robots. The elder can communicate with the robot verbally and also nonverbally through buttons with simple selected color and shapes as widely-used.

Phan 2

Conclusion Overall, for future robots or any engineering design for those specific users: children and elders, many issues should be considered and improved. For example, the design should be more user-friendly, safer, and easier to communicate. The new robot designs should take human factors seriously as the same as other qualities such as efficiency, safety, simply, and so on. It is an engineering duty to make sure that the next design for those users will have a better interaction, and better server the physical, cognitive, and social/emotional needs of the users.

References Chiasson, S. & Gutwin, C. (2005). Design Principles for Children’s Technology (HCI-TR-200502). Technical Report Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan. Meng, Q., & Lee, M.H. (2006). Design issues for assistive robotics for the elderly. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 20(2), 171-186....