Wheelchair Pants

Iron Man’s suit come true

Problem

It takes a large amount of strength, efforts, and time for people with lower limb paralysis to put on their pants.

“The jolt from the alarm increases blood pressure and heart rate, two things that can have a detrimental effect on your health in the long term.” National Institute of Industrial Health in Japan

“More than 80% of people feel dreadful or anxious when their alarm goes off in the morning.” 2000 people surveyed by SleepJunkie

Opportunites

Case studies

Opportunities

Iterations

To define the exterior, Ke pulled elements from the direction of airflow, which let the function guides to a form that is purposeful in its decency.

Confirming the core mechanisms took a lot of experiments, with different ways of triggering smell, and with different components. Eventually it was confirmed that coffee smell will be released by fan blowing at coffee grounds packed in disposable pods with copper plate heating underneath. Tests show that the coffee pods could last for about 14 days before the smell started to fade.

It took 9 full iterations of models to satisfy all functions.

Form Exploration

Structural Exploration

Wrap & Auto-attach

Mechanism

Patterns

From the beginning, Ke wanted to create a minimal yet ritual experience after studying that many cases’ control panels confuse their users with unintuitive, complicated buttons/menus.

By adapting a familiar shape of time, Ke put an abstracted clock-like konb that users can simply turn to set the number of hours they need to sleep and press to confirm.

Through user testing, it was surprising to know that users would want to rotate only the top surface with fingers instead of turning the whole knob with hand, because some hands are not big enough to turn it comfortably.

How much better?

Eventually, if Coffee Waker is put beside its two main competitors, Coffee Waker stands out to be the most scientifically effective, elegant, and easy to use.

SensorWake

Artificial Scent

Unreliable hardware (users’ feedback)

Confusing setting/control (users’ feedback)