How to improve the cancer care quality -the development of the emotion-focus supportive sensor chair LCare
A fascinating fact of non-verbal language is that we can't always control our non-verbal language with consciousness. People use language to communicate in everyday life, but at the same time, we express what we want to say with our body and facial language too. In this way, the non-verbal language talks more about the truth. In some certain extreme conditions, for example, when people face life-threatening issues, people may even lie with what they say but still tell the truth with their face and body. Professionals of different fields have solved problems by reading the non-verbal language, like the FBI agents who will read people’s facial expressions to do the investigation. This is how I get the inspiration to make LCare, a sensor chair that can tell the true feelings of cancer patients. In cancer care, the doctor is still mainly understanding their patients through language but ignoring the gestures and body language expressions. This thesis proposes the medical design LCare to add the other communication layers between the doctor and the patient. LCare is an emotion-focus supportive sensor chair for the healthcare facilities, especially to help the doctors better understand the cancer patients by detecting the patients' hidden emotions with pressure sensors and showing warning signals to the doctors, and changing the environment lighting. The doctor may change the communication strategy based on corresponding color change on the armrests (red for shock, green for calm, blue for fear), and the environment lighting will change to purple when detected emotion of fear and thus calm the patient's nerve. The system of LCare contains the input and output parts and creates an immersive lighting care environment for the patients also. LCare helps collect the data from every case in the cancer care facilities and constructs the big database for the medical study.
Design, Medical design, Non-verbal language, Emotional support
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign