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Assistive device design classes are popular and often incorporate local community members in projects as stakeholders, or need-knowers. It remains important to generate best practices to improve student-stakeholder interactions in these service-based classes, particularly those that focus on the early product design stages like need-finding and feels-like prototyping. This study is performed across two offerings of the new class “Augmenting Human Dexterity” at the University of California at Berkeley; it serves as a case study of the lessons presented, and resulting perceptions of its instructors and students. In the class project, students participate in need-knower identification and recruitment processes. In this preliminary study, we ask: what can students learn through this process? Given only a small handful of student groups produce a physical device that can be given to the need-knower at the end of the term for daily use, we ask: how do students portray this expectation? With the lessons provided, students expand their understanding of disability and accurately communicate expected deliverables to the need-knower at the time of recruitment and interview. This preliminary work must be followed by further studies in order to establish generalizable results. Regardless, we present potential methods for managing projects in assistive device classrooms that focus on early product design stages. 

In this paper a novel telescopic manipulator was adapted to a mobile robotic base to perform manipulation tasks in an elder care facility. As indicated by our previous work, leisure activities and engagement in socialization were desirable among elders, and a physical game assisted by the robot was chosen to investigate both its acceptance and interaction with the older adults. The robot was deployed at an assisted living center and performed multiple interactions. The manipulator was able to successfully retrieve items from different heights as part of the game and results from post-interaction surveys with elders indicated high perceived usefulness and comfort in having the robot as an assistant in the game.