Today Amolika and I continued with our research on back braces. We researched more about existing back braces and collecting ideas from them. We annotated a new posture device created by Apple. This device detects when you are slouching and vibrates you to remind you to straighten up. We looked at the strengths and weaknesses of this device as this will help us whilst designing our back brace, in regard with what to do and what not to do. We also annotated a back brace by Kogan which uses magnetics to gently straighten up your posture. This helps us with continuing progress on making a back brace as we know now different strengths and weaknesses we want within our back brace.
Today we achieved the goal we had set from last week which was to research about existing braces and devices, to assist us with design and creation of our back brace, incorporating all of the strengths of the various designs. We also organised our portfolios displaying all of our research, proposals, and ideas. I feel as if we are moving along very well and are right on track to make our back brace and get it to function correctly. Next term we plan to finish off our research and start sketching, prototyping and making the back brace. This makes me very excited about next term as I can’t wait to start making the brace. I am excited about solving the problems we come across to make the brace work and the feeling of accomplishment when we do it.
We are also thinking of doing a survey to collect ideas from our peers about whether they would benefit from a back brace, the type of back brace they would find useful, the price they would be willing to pay for a brace and the materials they think would be best to use to make it as comfortable as possible. We believe that this survey will be highly assistive with our research, as it will allow us to further develop our ideas on what our back brace could potentially look like. Having first hand views from our peers who undertake a similar level of study to us, will allow us to see what kind of back brace would be most suitable for our age group. We have started forming some ideas of what our back brace could potentially look like, but the next stage in our process is to gather all of our research together and apply the knowledge gained, in the designing of our back brace.