Problem
“The devastating effect of a profound congenital hearing loss on the development of language and communication skills has been of concern to parents, physicians, educators, and clinicians for decades.”
- Mary Joe Osberger
The chances of being born deaf is relatively high: “about 2 to 3 out of every 1,000 children in the United States are born with a detectable level of hearing loss in one or both ears.” According to the WHO Deafness and Hearing Loss Factsheet, “one of the main impacts of hearing loss is on the individual’s ability to communicate with others” and “spoken language development is often delayed in children with deafness.”
As “more than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents,” hard-of-hearing children’s parents are not always aware of best practices or knowhow in supporting or fostering their children’s communication and linguistic skills. Furthermore, there are limited tools to help this spoken linguistic development in a fun way that is inclusive for children, who could benefit from their peers who already may have developed their spoken language skills, as parents may not always have the time or bandwidth to do so. The problem is even worse in developing countries as access to clinicians and speech therapists is difficult, and “children with hearing loss and deafness rarely receive any schooling.”
Needfinding + Interviews
Zina Jawadi, one of our interviewees who has prelingual bilateral sensorineural hearing loss.
We conducted needfinding at the AYJN Institute for the Hearing Handicapped, visited families with deaf children in Palo Alto, and conducted interviews with Zina Jawadi (who, at the time of the interviews, was a Stanford student with prelingual bilateral sensorineural hearing loss).
Through these, we uncovered the need for hard-of-hearing children to play in an integrated manner with their hearing friends as well as the extent to which their parents felt they didn’t know how to help their children in a fun way. From these, we developed the following How Might We statement that guided our whole design process.
How might we create a therapy game that children with auditory challenges can play at home with their family and friends, which would accelerate language learning, in the younger years when their hearing is still strong?
Concept
As we set out to prototype, we formulated four design principles. These principles were ones that stood out the most from our needfinding as well as visits to Bing Nursery, where we observed how children interacted with and enjoyed the toys there.
Fun - naturally attract the kids to play with it
Intuitive - be easy to use for parents & teachers
Creative - encourage the kids to try various ways of playing
Inclusive - bring able & disabled kids to play together, giving rise to empathy
We looked at the toys that children enjoyed playing with, including these Tegu blocks. The warmth afforded by the wooden material stood out to us in particular with these.
These clear Magna tiles were also very interesting, as the magnets in these afforded easy stacking and build, as with Legos.
In addition to observing the children playing with their most-loved toys, we also interviewed teachers who showed us how children would often create stories with the blocks.
Prototyping + Testing
As we consistently conducting on-site research, we also started prototyping as per our How Might We statement. We started brainstorming some ideas based on the inspirational toys that children naturally found fun. Our final design idea was a lip-reading game in which children would make sentences together just by mouthing the words without actually saying it aloud. This was a game that we envisioned both hearing and hard-of-hearing children to be playing together. In figuring out how we wanted to implement this design, we tested various shapes and words.
Testing out our concept of creating a game with words on each shape
Testing out shapes with rounded corners to play around with
Testing our concept of the game with a selection of three shapes
We tested the concept with speech therapists, teachers, and parents to verify educational validity as well as get a sense of whether children would enjoy playing this game. Upon receiving favorable reviews, we developed an iteration of our prototype beyond the conceptual phase to a physical product that children could play with.
We chose a 1/4” thick Duron as our material and produced our prototype pieces with engravings of images and words to be laser cut with precision and consistency.
We laser cut vinyl stickers with vibrant colors to go into the engravings so that they would be visually appealing.
We transferred the icons and letters into the engraved parts of the Duron pieces as well as created thin cards with the vinyl “negatives” for a different version of the game.
Design solution
The final prototype of our game Rhombus Rumbles is shown below; it consists of played tiles with words and the respective icons, cards with the reverse of the vinyl cutouts (that were transferred onto the rhombus tiles), a dispenser that holds all the cards, and a color picker (not shown here).
There are various ways to play with Rhombus Rumbles! One is a word-guessing game where one player extracts a card from the dispenser and mouths the word to the other player, who then has to guess the word correctly to retrieve the tile. Another is a sentence-forming game where players mouth the words and have to string them together to form coherent sentences.
The poster we presented at RESNA 2015 showing our Rhombus Rumbles game being used by children.
Features
The rhombus shape is easy to tesselate. The size and thickness were chosen for ease of grip and for safety. Colorful images support the text below them and the various colors represent the various levels in the point of articulation.Benefits
The game allows children with hearing disabilities to practice lip-reading within a fun context. It’s a game that can be played by children with and without hearing disabilities, so it’s an inclusive game that everyone can play together.Aesthetics
The pieces have vibrant colors on them. Also, for an intuitive understanding of the corresponding pieces, we’ve used the negative vinyl cuts for the rhombus cards. The streamlined and minimalistic design conveys that this game is intuitive and easy.Safety
The size of the rhombus discourages children from putting it into their mouths. The rounded corners of our rhombus pieces prevent children from getting themselves hurt.Reliability
Duron is a hardy material that won’t break easily and is reliable.Usability
There are only two components to this game and they are all of the same shape, hence easy to use. We have also shaped and sized the pieces to optimize usability.
CAD image of all the parts of the game with one of the Duron pieces, one of the colored cards, one color picker, and one dispenser to hold all the cards.
CAD image of a card being pulled out of the dispenser from the opening at the bottom.
Reference
Us with Rhombus Rumbles!
[1] Mary Joe Osberger from ‘Language and Learning Skills of Hearing-Impaired Students’ of MONOGRAPHS #23 http://www.asha.org/uploadedFiles/publications/archive/Monographs23.pdf
[2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Identifying infants with hearing loss – United States, 1999-2007. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 59(8): 220-223.
[3] Vohr B. Overview: infants and children with hearing loss—part I. Ment Retard Dev Disabil Res Rev. 2003;9:62–64.
[4] WHO Deafness and hearing loss Factsheet
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs300/en/