Hannah's ipod project

This semester, I'm going to continue my ipod project with a new twist: I'll be working on the project as an internship with the Adaptive Design Association. I'm going to be making a new version of a muti-switch music station originally designed by Alex Trusedell in the 80's. Her version used three cassette players to give musical feedback to users for successful completion of tasks (usually activating various switches that improve fine motor skills). While cassette players were functional, there were several problems with them: they were heavy and bulky; they could play a limited amount of music, depending on the length of the cassette tapes; and they required that someone eject and flip the tape whenever it came to the end of one side. Although tape players can now automatically flip the tape without a manual ejection, they still add a tremendous amount of weight and bulk to the station. The version I'm going to be working on will replace the old cassette players with an ipod, which will reduce the size and make the station much more portable, as well as increase the size of the music library available and add more music control functions.

Ideally, the new music station will be reproduced and customized for a variety of children and needs, but to begin, I'm going to focus on creating a music station especially for Hannah (see Hannah's story). In the next week, I hope to meet with Hannah's occupational therapist and possibly her parents to discuss her individual needs and get a better idea of what kind of switches/sensors I'll want to include in the station. I'm also hoping to visit Hannah's class and meet Hannah herself.

On the ipod technical front, I've started to translate my Processing code to Arduino so that an Aruduino microcontroller can replace a laptop in the system. Over the next week, I plan to have that code completed as an Arduino library (which I'll release on this site), at which point I'll begin using physical switches to activate the functions as opposed to keypresses.