Anasay
AI-powered AAC for people with MND
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Challenge Area
People with motor neuron disease (MND) often rely on Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices to enhance or imitate speech as their condition progresses. However, the limitations of current AAC devices restrict users to one-word or short sentence responses, necessitating reliance on a 'story guardian' to convey their personal information and stories. This dependency hinders their ability to communicate fully and independently, impacting their quality of life and personal autonomy. Addressing these limitations is essential to develop more advanced AAC solutions that allow for richer, more autonomous communication for individuals with MND.
Possible Solution
This speculative design introduces an assistive and augmented communication (AAC) application tailored for people with MND, enabling richer narratives and long-form conversations. Leveraging natural language generation (NLG) and image and text recognition AI, the application facilitates more comprehensive and autonomous communication, allowing users to express themselves more fully and reduce reliance on a 'story guardian'.
Approach
To deliver significant outcomes at each stage of the project, I utilized the British Design Council's Double Diamond design methodology. This approach allowed me to set clear deliverables for each phase of the process, ensuring structured and focused progress from discovery to delivery.
User research
My Role
As a UX designer and researcher, I facilitated discussions and interviews, and analyzed literature to create a detailed persona and user journey map. I led sketching sessions to brainstorm solutions, created a basic wireframe to visualize the initial concepts, and developed an interactive prototype in Figma based on user feedback.
Collaborative design
Sketching
User journey maps
Wireframing
Workshops
Prototyping
User personas
User testing
Discover
Discussions and Interviews
I facilitated an open discussion with a speech therapist working with people with MND focusing on the symptoms and challenges of living with MND, as well as a semi-structured interview with a person with MND, focusing on the participant's experiences of the diagnosis and any specific challenges he had. The participant was passionate about raising awareness of MND and providing his story, voicing his concern with later being fully dependent on someone else to assist him.
Literature Review
I conducted an in-depth literature review across major research databases, search engines, and social media platforms to identify common challenges faced by people with MND. I focused on a wide range of sources, from academic research to community feedback, to capture a holistic view of their needs and challenges. This thorough review aimed to uncover recurring themes and issues that were used in discussions and interviews, as well as the design.
Key Insights
User research was conducted with a team of other colleagues, in tandem with defining the solution. Thematic trends were tracked on the team’s Miro page and informed the focus of our individual projects. We referenced the user research findings throughout the entire design process.
Define
User Persona
Based on user research and existing personas developed by the ALS Society of Canada, I created a detailed persona and user journey map. The persona was designed to capture the goals, pain points, and overall experience of individuals with MND. This persona helped build a deeper understanding of the users' needs and challenges, allowing for a more empathetic and targeted approach in addressing their specific requirements.
User Journey Map
The user journey map served as a visualization of the persona's experience when seeking, attending, and processing a clinic appointment. It mapped out each step of the process, highlighting the persona's interactions, challenges, and emotions throughout the journey. From the map, the problem statement was developed, focusing on communication issues identified during this journey.
Problem Statement
How can technology be utilised to assist people with MND in communicating their experiences to others?
Discover
Sketching
To generate a solution to assist Jean, our persona, in for the discovered user needs, I conducted a rapid 10-minute-sketching session to imagine six possible solutions. Three of the proposed solutions met the user needs expressed, where a common theme was to ability to quickly generate a linguistic output from non-linguistic data.
I tested the wireframes on participants to gain user feedback. The participants did not have MND but were fully informed about the condition and the use of AAC. Without code, user testing used Wizard-of-Oz methodology to emulate the expected outcomes. I collected feedback using a one-on-one semi-structured interview following from their interactions with the wireframes. User testing provided adjustments to be integrated into the second design iteration and to accommodate the user needs.
Product Ideation
The final concept is a speculative design on how non-linguistic data obtained from the user’s camera, voice recordings and photos/videos can be taken as input to contribute to a database of relevant words, AI-generated sentences and personalised common phrases. The data can be later used by users to generate a narrative. which can be shared immediately via text-to-speech, saved for later or posted online to social media.
Wireframing
After some initial sketching, a basic wireframe of the application was developed using Figma to display the functional requirements of the device system. Non-functional design requirements were avoided in the wireframe to ensure a quick build. The wireframe allows for a reference point for user testers to comment on the most important functions of the app.
User Testing
Deliver
In the second iteration, the feature placement was established and user feedback implemented into the design. A mid-fidelity prototype was developed with the addition of non-functional design requirements, based on the wireframe. The mid-fi prototype operated as a non-interactive product design suggestion.
Visual Design
Planned evaluation
The evaluation of the wireframe allowed for constructive user feedback based on the actions and opinions of the participants. However, testing with people with MND would assure better feedback and iterations.
Since the design is speculative, a future evaluation plan for the subsequent hi-fi prototype would be:
Develop a functional hi-fi prototype for all major functionalities that can be offered to people with MND using AAC for diary studies
Conduct experiments to test the following hypothesis:
"The speed of telling long-form narratives will be significant faster for people with MND using our NGL AAC versus people with MND using standard AAC interfaces."
Conduct experiments to measure the accuracy of the AAC device in registering and translating non-linguistic data into usable natural language.