Linkin

Overview

Linkin is a customizable device that acts as an add-on attachment for a glove and is designed to help people working in the challenging habitat of the North/South Poles to help stay connected with their families and act as a schedule keeper for their daily activities.

DATE: Mar. 2016 — May. 2016
TEAM: Lois Zhao, Pooja Srikrishnan
ROLE: Product Designer, Graphic Designer, Photographer, Video Producer

pROBLEM sTATEMENT

Often researchers working at the Poles have to deal with the challenge of surviving not just in harsh weather conditions but also deal with 24 hours of daylight or darkness. This makes syncing their biological clocks and gauging an accurate perception of time to be a big challenge. Additionally, this group of people also experience an emotional disconnect with their family and loved ones back home while working in these conditions for upto a few months at a time. Our product aims to provide a solution to solve these major problems experienced by this user group.

The short video commercial highlights the problem statement and gives you a glimpse of our product:

oUR SOLUTION

Our approach to solve the problem is LinKin – An add on attachment for any glove that helps the user stay connected with family and with their own schedules via visual alarms and on body heating to attract the user’s attention. We also provide the users family and friends with a Web based interface to help feed in information they wish to communicate to the user. The added customization factor of most of our components is what makes this product useful and easily discoverable for its target users.

Features

Our product has the following features:

A web interface to help set up alarm times and activities
A customizable display featuring a set of icons that light up to alert the user of the upcoming activity
Using controlled heating to alert the user
A light dependent interface to snooze the alarm
A button interface to stop the alarm
An interaction mechanism to help the user and their family stay connected when they miss each other

pROTOTYPING

We went through several iterations of works like and looks like models to come up with our final product.

Prototype 1

For our first prototype, we brainstormed through different wearable accessories and decided to go with a glove. Additionally, we zeroed in on some materials to use for the display.
We also decided on using a heating element and a display as our modalities for alerting the user.

Materials used for our product

Gloves

Prototype 2

For the look of our 2nd prototype, we used a laser cut display with lots of numbers and few icons to try and illustrate our concept. We faced problems due to the concentration of the light but solved by using a layer of diffusion paper.
For the hardware, we started off with the 8×8 rainbowduino in conjunction with the Huzzah Feather to light up some icons and numbers in our display. The primary problem we noticed in this was the bulky size of this display due to the controller needed for the rainbowduino matrix.

Glove with rainbowduino and lasercut display

Display test without diffusion paper

Display test with diffusion paper

Prototype 3

In this iteration of our looks like model, we designed a complete display with more icons and less numbers and text, as we received feedback that it maybe easy to perceive icons better than text on our display.
We also showcased a functional demo with the rainbowduino, display and a button to give a sound proof of concept. Additionally, we also started working with the RTC chip and different time libraries.

Glove with rainbowduino and new display

Redesigned Display

Attaching display to the rainbowduino

Prototype 4

In this prototype, we designed and printed out our first frame that could be attached to the glove using rubber bands. We also decided to use Adafruit’s 8×8 neomatrix as a sleeker alternative to the rainbowduino.
Our hardware setup saw some major advances in this prototype, where we successfully integrated the RTC into our code. We also demoed our snooze and stop functionality using an LDR and button respectively. We faced some challenges with our heating element at this stage and after failed attempts with a transistor, decided to use a MOSFET for our next iteration.

Glove with Frame and Neomatrix

All Components of the Prototype

Layered Frame Design

Final Prototype

Our final prototype after several iterations has a new and improved display with 3 slots for the neopixel matrix, diffusion paper and the display. It has a cover that helps prevent these layers from moving or falling out of the frame. The fastening mechanism has been altered to adapt to any glove type and any wrist size using adjustable Velcro fastenings. The heating element is now enclosed in a black fabric housing to help with heat retention.

On the hardware front, we designed a PCB board to help make our electronics a little more organized. However, due to limited current capabilities of the copper tracks our board could not function well and we decided to stick with a breadboard implementation. We developed a Web interface using Mobile Jquery and Cordova.js platform to help the user set up alarm times and activities. The Huzzah feather code was modified to connect to an existing WiFi network, read requests from the Web Interface and take action accordingly. Due to challenges with the RTC, we decided to use the internal ESP8266 clock for our final prototype.

Final Prototype

All Components of Final Prototype

Controller, CPB board, Battery

Heat element and sensors

Working demo

The following video presents a working demo of our product and illustrates the various functionalities and interaction mechanisms between the hardware and software.