Anuraag - The Interactive Armrest
Finding Emotional Agency Through Touch and Sound in Elder Care
Physical Computation
Iterative Prototyping
Multimodal
Project Type:
Design Project (8 weeks)
Discipline:
New Media Design
Project Goal:
To define a novel, low-friction pathway for self-isolating older adults in elder care facilities to find emotional agency and private comfort, thereby mitigating the mental health risks associated with profound loneliness and the refusal of external therapeutic help.
Person interacting with the "Uttejana (Excitement)" template of the interactive armrest
Placing the "Reassuring (Aashwasan)" template and interacting with the armrest (live demo)
Conversations with urban elders, Music School Visits, Secondary Research
Visiting Elder Care Facilities and conducting expert interviews
Ideating, building and testing physical prototypes
Form studies, building the software, material and finish
The Research Journey: From Music Theory to Elder Care
The project began with a pivot, shifting focus from "Can the elderly learn music?" to "How can sensory input provide emotional relief?"
Methods: Conversations with urban elders, visits to music schools (Saptak, Harmony, Maroon), and expert interviews with music teachers.
Key Insights:
Musical engagement is dictated by exposure and encouragement across the life span.
Older adults' sensory soundscape becomes more alien as they age, causing them to retreat to smaller, controlled spaces.
A large barrier to learning is an ingrained cautiousness and conservatism.
Mapping exposure to music in one's life in terms of Spectating, Performing and Yearning.
Methods: Visits and interviews with facility contacts (Ashit Gandhi) and experts, including a Geriatric Physiotherapist (Professor Pothiraj), Geriatric Psychologist (Kshitija Sawant), and the CEO of Healthy Aging India (Dr. Manjiri Chaturvedi).
Core Problem Identified: The tragic journey of the self-isolating resident (e.g., "Shyamji")—who leaves the family due to conflict, struggles to adapt to the new home, and finally lets sadness turn to stubborn refusal of help.
The reality of adapting to an elder care facility
Stubborn Sadness in Elder Care Facilities
Residents in elder care facilities often struggle with profound loneliness and a sense of abandonment. This crisis leads to severe self-isolation.
Emotional Barrier: This deep sadness turns to stubbornness, manifesting as refusal to speak with psychologists or therapists.
Trust Barrier: Residents find it difficult to be vulnerable with peers, often stating that people tend to be judgmental and unkind,
Iterative Design: The Path to the Artefact
The final design successfully integrated the artifact into an object of daily living and was easy to connect with.
Designed to test out a quick and easy way to voice your emotional state in a positive manner. May reduce the barrier to emotional expression by a lot, by keeping language out of it. The identify-express flow is made accessible, by allowing one to select an emotional state and voice musical notes coherent with it.
What I learnt:
The context of the interaction is not well established.
Complex Raagas were not understood or appreciated.
Prototype was extremely low fidelity.
A physical station/product that allows elderly residents perform a collaborative exercise, unlocking songs that go into a music library as a reward. Goal is to incentivize elderly residents to have shared experiences with each other.
The prototype accepts button input and sends it wirelessly to multiple devices to trigger audio playback. Much like the game Simon, the goal is to press buttons in a correct sequence in order to play parts of a song in the correct order to unlock it.
What I learnt:
Shared activities and music taste were too complicated to enforce.
Abandoned collaboration; focused on individual comfort and privacy.
Dividing a digital touch interface into 4 quadrants, this prototype allows one to use their finger to control the audio. Each quadrant expresses a different musical raag, and thereby, allows for 4 different emotions to be expressed. The user can feel which quadrant they resonate with in the moment.
What I learnt:
Older adults refused to interact with the tablet, finding the interface ambiguous.
They stated inability to appreciate and perform music, and expressed a fear of being judged.
The design must be integrated into a familiar item (the armrest) and use simple, tactile input.
Final Prototype: Soundscape Generating Armrest
ANURAAG is an interactive armrest designed to enable a private emotional shift.
Core Mechanism: Residents place a themed template onto the armrest to load a soundscape, which is then subtly controlled by simple finger movements.
Therapeutic Soundscapes: The sound library consists of sound environments curated for specific emotional states:
Calming (शांत): Birdsong and rain.
Reassuring (आश्वासन): Familiar human environments like a kitchen or market.
Invigorating (उत्तेजना): Bright, sharp, musical notes.
Shared Humanity: The soundscape templates are physically constructed and decorated by school children, creating a connection and sense of being acknowledged by the outside community.
Coding the soundscapes and designing the touch interface in PureData and MobMuPlat
Developing the form and shape
A video walkthrough of all three soundscapes and interactions (live demo)
The project acknowledges that for those deeply isolated, the solution lies not in a social intervention, but in an integrated, low-effort sensory design that addresses the basic human need to feel acknowledged. The effectivity of the tool within the context is to be tested.
The nature of the interaction opens up a scope within contexts away from the elder care space, more as a musical instrument or music education tool.