Project title:
Interactive Exhibit Design & Prototyping
for the NUS Anatomy Museum
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Project name:
Duce - An interactive concept
to learning about the nervous system
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Project leader:
Keio-NUS CUTE Centre:
Dr. Yen Ching Chiuan
Yong Lin
Chuah Teong Leong
Mandi Lee
Genevieve Low
Sim Yong Jie
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Collaborators:
NUS Medicine:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Dinesh Kumar
E. Prof. Rajendran Kanagasuntheram
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Team members:
Christine Yap Yee Ling
Claire Chou I Nung
Phan Mai
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Special thanks to:
Justin Law
Tan Pek Yan
Tey Yi Qing
Heng Li Wei
Cathryn Cai Yuan
other medicine students we interviewed around campus
Brief:
In this platform, Keio-CUTE Centre collaborated with the NUS School of Medicine’s Anatomy Museum to design an appealing interactive exhibit.
This project introduced design implications and constraints of the current and near-future state of Human-Computer Interaction, and worked with existing technology platforms to create a working prototype capable of effectively demonstrating an interactive design concept.
During the platform, students will cover the development cycle of interaction and interface design, with exposure to development constraints and user testing. Students will also learn to resource-constrained project management and scoping, which are key elements of real-world interaction and interface design.
Support for developing prototypes will be provided by CUTE Center. Concepts developed during this platform were kept for revision and may be selected and implemented as exhibits in the museum.
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Project descriptions:
Year 1 and 2's anatomy lays the foundation for greater and deeper medical knowledge and practices in later year, and hence is crucial to medicine student. The exhibit aims to make learning anatomy easier and tries to tackle some difficult concepts.
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In year 1 and 2, medical students learn the basics of the human body, the human anatomy. Anatomy lays the foundation for greater and deeper medical knowledge and practices in later years. It is, hence, crucial that they learn these chapters well and retain knowledge for as long as possible.
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With 2 full years' load of pure factual knowledge to absorb, learning anatomy can be quite dry and challenging, especially lacking in stimuli with only repeated visual and audio materials on paper or screens.
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Our project aimed to assist the students in retaining their knowledge for much longer by introducing another dimension of stimuli, a different learning experience, helping long-term memory formation and strengthening.
The beginning:
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We met with Dr. Dinesh and were given a tour of the Anatomy Museum. As the museum was sectioned by body parts, we were divided into groups and assigned out research topic according to the sections as a suggested starting point. Our group was assigned the upper limb.
​The journey:
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Without any knowledge of the human anatomy, we quickly studied the medical students textbooks, attended their lectures and interviewed them for more insights. We perused the various systems of the body searching for pain points where we could help.
Eventually, we decided to work on the nervous system, starting with the Brachial Plexus of the upper limb.
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The nervous system consists of motor nerves and sensory nerves, both of which would have to be taken into account for an accurate depiction in the exhibit.
We researched the various conditions, symptoms of specific nerve damage and try to simulate that in our prototypes.
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We constantly interviewed Dr. Dinesh and medical students to refine our prototype.
Summary and evaluation:
The full concept:
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While we only tested a few nervous injuries on the upper limb as proof of concept, it is expandable to the rest of the body and is shown to help with active recalling, improve learning and strengthen long-term memories.
This is our vision of a rough layout of the exhibition concept, where each area features nerves in a specific part of the body, with similarly simulated conditions.
The different stations feature different body parts and related conditions that user could experience.
There is also videos of summary lectures being played and existing VR kits to be utilised to help students revise.
Ideally, it would be a single immersive exhibit where the audience could step in and experience all conditions, instead of separate stations where the body part is constrained to a small hole. However, this is restricted by the technologies of our times and is expected to be realised as technology advances.