UC Berkeley Master of Design - Making Mental Health Support Accessible For Blind Children

🗒️ Overview: For a UC Berkeley technology course project, I designed an innovative bedside companion device specifically for visually impaired and blind children struggling with emotional regulation. This interactive and tactile toy delivers personalized mental health strategies through a multi-sensory experience. By responding to a child's expressed emotions with human voice guidance, comforting dog bark sounds, and gentle vibration patterns, the device creates an accessible and calming experience that doesn't rely on visual feedback, making emotional support tools more inclusive for children with visual impairments.

🏆 Impact: Created accessible mental health intervention for visually impaired children, developed multi-sensory feedback system using voice, sounds and vibrations, demonstrated inclusive design principles for emotional support tools

Role

Product Designer/Engineer

Timeline

3 weeks (October '21')

Team (besides myself)

Myself

Problem

User input

Output

Solution

Conclusion

Problem

Blind/visually impaired children (below age 10) aren't aware of how to navigate emotions.

When children are distressed, they often turn to stuffed animals that comfort them. To support their accessibility needs, I worked on making it easily detectable to interact with the friendly toy, which responds to the child's emotions.

User Input

Designing and programming a button that triggers speech input and uses NLP

I fabricated a button with braille so children could easily access the soft toy and feel soothed.1

. Blind/visually-impaired child presses button
2. Child can state emotion and script detects the keywords that trigger a vibration and unique audio output, the mental health strategy for cope with said emotion

Our team met with social workers and non-profit leadership to create journey maps of the fostering process. This user research helped us understand the different types of parents that sign up and the complicated journey that occurs for resource families. Altogether, this research helped us streamline the signup process for parents and the application review process for Angels Foster Care.

Output

Designing conditional statements to provide tailored mental health strategies

Example mental health strategy: Input = Button, speech (“happy) Output = Bark sound (happy), Mental health strategy (happy) “I’m so happy that you’re feeling happy today. You should be proud of yourself. Give yourself a pat on the back.”

Solution

An interactive mental health toy that's engaging and helpful to blind children

We were given some starter code, and I modified/revised/added code of my own to produce the following demo.

Conclusion

Exploring and programming AI for the first time

This was uncharted territory for me, but I learned to tackle technical challenges in ways I never did before. I got to learn the mechanics of how AI works through NLP and build my own interactive product outside the usual digital realm, what I've been so used to for the past years.