Let's walk! Design the gait test station for children

Abstract

This project aims at designing a gait test station for children. The gait test station tests children’s walking in Child Brain Lab at Sophia Children’s hospital. The children in this project are at the age of 4-10 with different capacities.
There are two scopes in this project, the service scope of the gait test and the experience scope of children. The service scope is to define the current procedure of the gait test. The procedure includes the gait test device, the gait test process, and the test conductor’s working experience. A service blueprint specifies the entire procedure. Another research with physical therapists, child experts, and parents by questionnaire is conducted in the service scope. With those experts’ experiences, I understand children’s related capacities to follow and finish a gait test; some design opportunities also are found. Regarding the scope of children’s experience, as the gait test station has not been set up at the hospital, the research with children is conducted at home, based on the defined service blueprint. In the Covid-19 situation, the children are researched remotely or at the family home with permission. With the research results, children’s current situations are defined and depicted in the experience maps. The current situations are four different typical situations at the gait test station. After the series of research activities, children’s current problems at the gait test station are defined. I formulate my design goal as Design an experience journey for children’s (aged 4-10) gait test to induce their natural walking, make them motivated and fun, or learn about the walking. A shortlist of design requirements is also concluded in the service scope. Before the design phase, there is a project phase of design sprints. I test and iterate different interventions in this phase for several rounds. With the intervention iterations, I can emphasize more on children to better design for them. With the iteration results, the design patterns are concluded on children’s experience maps. A list of design elements is also concluded from the iteration interventions. In the design phase, concepts have been generated with the combination of all the design patterns. As these are the combined concepts, I first evaluate if the concept includes all the design elements in different design patterns. The concepts are also evaluated with the hospital in the service scope. With these two evaluations, one concept has been selected. This concept contains three different tasks for different types of children. The three tasks are exploring walking knowledge, imitating animal walking, and sending animals to the jungle. Children can have one task during the gait test to achieve the envisioned experience. In the final concept, the technology tool is changed from the previous concept to enhance the walking experience. With the final concept, a new service blueprint and a technology roadmap are made as final deliverables. Considering a long-term implementation, I also implemented the concept into the interactive videos for short term use. The interactive videos can directly work at the gait test station, also as a final deliverable.