Design Process Overview
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Guide to use
1/ Put on the Hug Pillow with the hook side on your neck so that you can comfortablely hugging onto the extension part
2/ Wind-up the heartbeat detector (the small chip outside of the Hug Pillow) to any of your hand wrist. Then checking it is already intertwining stoutly on your wrist.
3/ Stay calm and steady, breath normally for a while, until the heartbeat number is stable (±2 difference) as displayed on laptop screen that is connected to the pillow
4/ Wait for several seconds, the vibration will be triggered and users can feel it at the back of their neck.
Sexual harassment is one of the most serious social phenomenon worldwide. It can be categorised into three main parts, physical sexual harassment, online sexual harassment and verbal sexual harassment. However according to the domain research, we found that physical sexual harassment has the greatest impact on individuals as compared to the rest. Therefore, we would like to focus on physical sexual harassment. To deal with it there are three stages:
- Before which is to prevent;
- On the spot of sexual harassment which is to encounter and deal with the situation;
- Lastly, after: it is how do we help victims to cope with the negative effect brought by experiencing physical sexual harassment.
Research have been focus a lot on the first two but helping victims to cope with their bad experience are often ignored while the psychological impairment is hard to be resolved.
Reports and papers have revealed that most cases of sexual harassment are happening to young females in public places, particularly with a high rate in entertainment places. Interviews have suggested that heir feelings are usually being ignored as most of the people are expecting physical sexual harassment to happen in those places. More than half of the victims often tend to close upon themselves rather than turn to someone for help as they are afraid of social judgement. Actually, they need unconditional physical and emotional need support while they are alone.
Therefore, our proposed solution is called “Hug Pillow” which is a specially designed “J” shape pillow in light blue with cotton texture. With these physical features, it aims to provide physical support such as comfort and reliance for female victims who suffered from physical sexual harassment in entertainment places.
In order to comfort users psychologically, it is used in such a way where users would placed the hook of the “J” onto his neck and the extended parts would lie onto user’s chest, which just nice for users to use his two arms hugging it.
The primary function of our pillow is to detect the heart rate while they are alone at home recalling the negative experience they have encountered. Heart rate are categorised into three levels - low heartbeat, normal heartbeat, and high heartbeat. Then appropriate vibration pattern would be produced according to the heartbeat level in order for them to calm down.
At the very beginning when we formed this group, all of us were agreed on doing the topic on sexual harassment.
A lot of papers have been done analysing the perception and behaviour of victims, existing technology are mainly focused on the before stage helping women to prevent sexual harassment, sometimes, it also include the second stage for dealing on the spot but not much have been done in helping women to cope with physical sexual harassment.We also found out that the impact of experiencing sexual harassment seem to be the most severe within young women and which may cause serious mental issues for victims. Therefore, it is a clear direction for us to explore in helping women to cope with the negative effect brought by experiencing sexual harassment.
There are two ideas we have thought of, the first one is a mobile application. The second idea is a anger/stress release punching machine,helping victims to feel better
However, the first idea is lacking in motivation for users to just go up and look at other's story while the second idea only help users to release stress/anger but not healing their wounded heart
In order to better understand their needs, We realised that our target user are still broad if we only targeting females in public places. With further research and statistics, entertainment places has the highest rate of physical sexual harassment. In order to know how these people feel, we conducted interviews with them and we discovered that different perception were held between them, where a group felt that it is alright to experience slight sexual harassment as it is the place that is common to happen such thing where the others felt they are offended and hostile towards sexual harassment. They often feel lonely and either afraid talk about this to their close friends or their friends don’t understand them why they going to such places if they mind to get harassment.
We felt there is a need to support them physically and emotionally, more research have shown that emotional state could be represented by heartbeat and by listening to similar experience from people with similar background, negative feeling could be appeased by listening to music, vibration and warm and soft things. Therefore, our proposed solution would be a dedicated shape of smart pillow, where it can provide physical comfort such as hugging, heating up or comfort through vibration and sound.
Due to the time limit, we are unable to produce a complete product, a minimum viable product is then produced with the primary feature of heartbeat detection then the first representative feature of vibration which enable users to feel comfortable eventually calm down and relaxed.
For Prototype 1, we aim to find out the relation between the heartbeat level and users real emotional states. Fortunately, we are able to conclude that in general, the higher the heartbeat level, the higher the severity of negative impact they think they were facing, thus, more impairment to them.
Then in Prototype 2, based on the different heartbeat levels, different vibration patterns are produced to comfort their emotions. Interviews and testing have suggested us that: low heartbeat prefers high frequency, long vibration length; normal heartbeat prefers high frequency, short vibration length; high heartbeat prefers low frequency, long vibration length. Also, the pressure preference is consistent with victims across all three levels of heartbeat, which is the strongest pressure of the vibration.
Prototype 3
