Photocredit: Joannie Lafrenière
Over the past few decades, there has been an exponential increase in the number of individuals who live with minimal communicative ability. While the reasons for this condition vary dramatically between individuals, many share the common difficulty of having limited to no ability to communicate or interact with the people and environment around them. This has enormous implications for their quality of life and the quality of life of their caregivers. While caregivers of this population are at high risk for burnout and often experience frustration if their interactions are perceived as unidirectional and unreciprocated, they often cherish those they care for, and are constantly searching for novel ways of communication and interaction.
The goals of this project are to 1) identify specific scenarios in the everyday life of caregivers and non-communicative individuals where biomusic would be useful and 2) to optimize biomusic to address the identified challenges, tailoring it to the needs of the caregivers. We ascribe to a participatory design process, where those directly using biomusic can extend their experiential knowledge of caring for non-communicative individuals to the design of biomusic, become well-informed experts as early adopters of preliminary design iterations, and communicate their needs directly to the design team such that the changes can be made based on well-informed feature requests. This project focuses on the needs of the caregiver, rather than the non-communicative individual. We aim to discover these needs through interviews, providing caregivers with prototypes of biomusic, assessing how the technology meets these needs, and determining how biomusic can be further improved.
This project is currently led by Dr. Stefanie Blain-Moraes, and is funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grant.
If you are a caregiver of a minimally communicative individual and are interested in co-designing or testing biomusic, please contact us directly.