Canary

We have been gone for a while and an update is long long due.

Let’s start with a small refresher:

Our device combats hearing loss for workers in the building field by flashing when the sound level is above 85db. The flash aims at alerting that workers should wear a hearing protection from now on.

Since, our device is not called « device » anymore but « Canary » !

Why Canary ? A long time ago, miners used to carry a canary in a cage while mining. Why you may ask ? Because, if a gaz leak appears, the canary due to his smaller size will die first alerting the miners that the should get out of the mine as soon as possible otherwise it may explode (Coup de grisou). Like that, you have the back story and a story to tell everyone at the next family meeting.

Canary is design to protect the worker individually by alerting him / her when the soud level will damage his/her earing long term. 85db may not sounds much but if you’re exposed for an extended period of time, you will suffer from serious hearing loss from the age of 50. In order to really effective, Canary needs to be as close as possible to the ear of the worker while being able to fit different types of outfit (jacket with or without pockets, simple t-shirt, hoodie). That’s where the design part of our team came up with the idea of a clip that will clip to any piece of fabric.

Fun fact: a prototype was created with the aim of testing the interaction between the object and the user. Every single person that came across the prototype took the proto and within seconds clipped it to his/her collar, pocket or fabric. ->We knew that we where onto something.

Someone mentioned that Canary may be perceived as a spy that may track what people do or say. Obviously we don’t want Canary to be compared to HAL 9000 (2001 Space Oddity). So the idea was to work on transparency:

we partially tackle that by working on the design by making the case translucent. The idea behind it that if the user is able to see some main components, she or he will be less afraid of it.

Additionally, we created an app that will help the user to see the data that is retrieved. This app will display the data gathered by Canary throughout the day, thus at any moment the average sound level per hour that a user was exposed to can be see. The data enables you to see the different sound levels for every device or for a group of device

With these new inputs, the customer journey needed to be changed:

Let’s take for example Jeremy, Jeremy is 34 and works in the building trade. More especially, he is an electrician, all day wiring building working hands in hands with bricklayer, painter, plumber.

A typical day for him with Canary will be as follow:

He arrives to work at 7am, after a meet up with his colleagues and boss he is dispatched to a construction side in the neighbourhood of Pully. Before leaving the workshop, he picks randomly a Canary from  Canary rack, clip it to his jacket’s collar and went on with his day.

As soon as he arrives at location, he is greeted by a friend of him named Antoine. Antoine informs him that he will work in the room next to Jeremy and it may be loud. Jeremy say thank you and start working on a wiring job while Antoine makes a bloodletting in a wall. After a few seconds, Jeremy’s Canary starts to flash, all of a sudden, Jeremy remembers that he should wear hearing protection and go grab them in his Van.

At the end of the day, Jeremy goes back to the company workshop and clips Canary back on the rack for charging and Jeremy leaves the workshop for his home. But the job of canary is not done, as soon as Canary is clipped on a rack, the average sound level for each hour is computed and transferred to the main server of Canary. So that, the next day, Jeremy’s manager with his username can see what was the average per hour to what sound level the workers of the section were exposed to.

With this customer journey you can have a better idea of how Canary interacts with the user and the customer.

The use of data doesn’t stop here, because again, some organisation like the Suva is interested by having a deeper understanding about the fluctuation of sound exposure for a worker. Moreover, interested by a product that can improve the safety of workers.

That last point leads us to a important point of how we will promote Canary. Suva being in close relationship with companies can when it’s relevant to use Canary advice the use of Canary. Canary will be available for sale on our own website and through some third parties like EM, Würth, Rajapack.

Let’s stop here for the first part of the update ! Second part is coming.

Hi,

“Guess who’s back? Back again” Eminem 2002

Yes, you are right, La Table team is back for a follow up on his or her (still not decided) project.

At the end of our last post, we left you with many questions. In the following paragraphs we will answer some of them with the help of researches we conducted.

Basically, our product aims to cancel noises produced by industrial machines using noise cancelling technology. The main beneficiary would be the workers that work near these machines (close enough that they can suffer from the noise the produce).

Some interviews with factory workers and manager confirmed the assumption about the noise produced by the machines. It is a problem and even if headphones are provided to the employee, it is his / her own responsibility to wear them. Some don’t because they say that it decreases their ability to be aware of their environment (someone walking behind them, a colleague warning about something) others say that they are used to the sound and don’t feel the need to wear any hearing protection headphone. On the manager side, they emphasise on the fact that the headphone must be worn while the machines are running, but they can’t go behind each workers and force them all day long to put the headphone on. Moreover, some say that there is a second negative effect caused by the laziness of some workers. Some companies have yearly reviews performed by external entities in order to check if the company comply with all the rules and because of the lack of assiduity from the workers they may loose some points because of that.

About the technical part, so yes it’s possible because it’s already implemented in some of the music headphones you can buy, but noise cancelling in our project require more than just cancelling ambient noise, we need to cancel the noise produced by one or more machines for each employee. Moreover, these people are moving, from one workplace to another one. Thus, we must cancel the noise at the employee level, implying for each employee to wear a pair of hearing protection headphones that carry the noise cancelling technology. By doing so, several problems occur:

1.the price of each headphone would be significantly higher than normal protection headphones.

2.The need to charge the headphones from time to time.

3.Headphone may not be the most suitable solution for any kind of work that require sound protection (tampon, plastic…)

So basically we had to rethink our solution because when faced with the reality of the filed, what we thought was good does not fits the needs and constraints of this problematic.

In order to have a wider view on the sound problematic at work we contact the Suva: Suva is the main insurer for incidents and illness at work. They have a section dedicated to sound which conduct many study about the various impacts of sound at the work place.

Moreover, when we talk about noise problems at work we have to take into account the legal part of things because some rules settle at what level (Db) a sound is considered as harmful or not depending on the frequency of the latter.

On the next episode of Keeping Up With La Table Team (and not The Kardashian Family), we will explain to you how we started over after the interview conducted with the Suva in Lucerne!

Hello,

La Table team was a bit behind schedules the past few weeks. However, a lot had been going on behind the scene.

In order to fill in the gap, we will update you on what happened since the last time we posted.

Now, you know that our main focus is about noise pollution, to do so, we documented ourselves about this topic and conducted several interviews with normal people, impaired people (hearing wise), people working in or with noisy environment. Throughout every single one of these interviews everybody agreed on the fact that noise is disturbing and something should be undertaken.

We started by learning more about hearing impaired people and the way they interact with everyone else.

Why hearing impaired people in particular? Because, we all had an anecdote about someone in our entourage that was affected by it and experiencing issues in his / her daily life.

Still, we did not focus on deaf people because they are not in between two worlds such as hearing impaired people. Deaf people cannot hear at all, so they have to use another way to communicate. Hearing impaired people can speak with non-hearing impaired people but they can encounter some difficulties depending on the context. If a hearing impaired person is standing in a noisy place or many people are speaking at the same time he or she might miss what is being said. Thus, they need to concentrate even more otherwise they phase out from the discussion causing some social exclusion.

Aside from the interviews, we found out that the amount of hearing impaired people is going to rise up drastically in the short term.

Having that in mind, we thought that prevention should be the way to go in order to have a significant impact on our environment.  We question ourselves and made researches on the places where the risk of damaging our hearing long term was at its highest.

One answer is the work place. Due to the fact that we are present on a daily basis and for an extended period of time, industrial working places for example are prone to damage the hearing of the people that are working nearby.

In this field, hearing protection headphones are distributed at no cost to workers. But it doesn’t mean that workers wear them when it is needed or mandatory.

With these conclusions, we started to think of a possible product that can overcome potential hearing damage in a noisy working environment (industrial, construction, manufacturing). The source of these loud and repeated noises are the machines and the receivers are the workers.

One answers ask for the help of the noise-cancelling technology:

With this technology, we can capture the sound produced by the machines, compute it and produce the same sound but reversed. Thus, we aim to “cancel” the noise produced by the machines in the same manner newer headphones do for ambient sounds.

However, it raises few problems:

-Is it ethical to cancel noise by noise?

-Technically is it possible and reliable?

-Is it interesting for a company to switch to that technology? What are the key drivers?

-What are the rules in force in this filed (how many decibels is consider as harmful)?

-Will it nudge workers to wear hearing protection headphones more frequently?

Most of these questions will be answered in our next post!

We hope you enjoy, the catch-up post!

-> Happy New Year <-

See you,

La Table Team.

This week we had to present our opportunity space. For this reason we discussed at length and summarized our perception of the initial theme of the \”Less is more\”.

We can therefore ask, what does \”Less is more\” mean according to La Table ?

\”Less is more\” can be applied to many fields such as design, engineering, art or ecology. The theme came with the idea to reduce consumption or at the very least make people aware of it. With Less is more as the starting point we began digging in this direction, thinking conceptually and in terms of design. Objects designed with a minimalist approach are really simple esthetically to make their use more accessible but can also be made with the intent of creating an object of which the use cannot be hijacked.

We kept digging, thinking about overproduction and by that extent pollution. There are many different types of pollution; environmental pollution which is caused by our raising demand of consumer goods, image pollution which means our desensitization to most visual media and is caused by the excessive use of social media and advertising. Finally we reached the topic of noise pollution, which anyone can experience in a noisy environment such as an open space office, the streets of a city, etc. Sound is everywhere. It is a very important aspect of our lives that we tend too often to forget because it is invisible. However, the world of acoustics surrounds us everyday. Silence is a utopia, even in the most quiet environment we can still hear ourselves.

To us sound seems to be a good theme to talk about the notion of Less is more.

We are looking forward to presenting you the continuation of our project, hoping that this introduction has aroused your curiosity.
See you next week

The less is more team attended an unexpected workshop last week-end. The later aimed to push the team to write a contract that sets rules within the group to reach a shared goal.

We went through many discussions on what was our goal, how to deal with a free rider, how to divide the work. We all agree that emphasising free speech is a key aspect of group consistency. This way, we believe that many issues can be avoided and in the long run team members will be more at ease with each other.

For the record, the exercise that consist on selecting 5 people to fire was propitious to an in-depth questioning on what should be prioritised. People with children last in the list? Interest of the company first? Focusing on managers’ feedback only? Focusing on grading?

Last Friday was the first meeting of « La table » Team. The aim of this session was to develop the team bounding and start to brainstorm about the “Less is more” topic.

Each member of the group shared about her / his conception of “Less is more” and how this way of life could be link to a problematic. Various ideas were approached like how media over load us with useless information, how over-consumption and waste is seen nowadays, even how penitentiary have seamlessly adopted a “less is more” approach out of necessity.

We talked at great length about the impact of sound in the streets, homes, work on us and how this could be related to our main research topic.

In the end, we realized that “Less is more” is a wide subject that can be implemented in many ways. Overall we are happy about this meeting because it was a way to get to know each other more and learn how to work with each other.

See you next week !

“La table est un type de meuble, initialement composé d’une surface plane et horizontale.”

Noémie Soriano : Industrial Design, ECAL

Karim Khatib : Robotics Master, EPFL

Charaf-ed-dine El Fattahi : Theoretical Physicist, EPFL

Paul Fritz : Media & Interaction Design, ECAL

Tobias Tingström : Master in Information System, HEC

Less is more. We will develop this problematic throughout the CHIC project.

The less is more spirit is what marks this century! While we aim to implement it in a more specific use, it could touch various fields. Our target is to gather different stuff in one, while taking into account other aspects such as security and simplicity. It is from this starting point that we will start our CHIC journey.

Cheers 🙂