Herd
A concept project developed as a senior capstone, Herd is a holistic service designed for children with cochlear implants to aid in their auditory/oral practice.
The Problem
For any child, learning to listen and speak can be incredibly challenging. For children with cochlear implants, it can be even more difficult. To make matters worse, there is a lack specialized learning tools for children with cochlear implants.
What is Auditory/Oral Communication Therapy?
It is a specialized form of educational based therapy meant to assist in the development of spoke language through listening and visual cues. Unfortunately, schools that offer this specialized support are few and far between.
Parents need on-demand at-home support.
466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss.
34 million of these are children.
More than 90% of D/deaf children are born to
hearing parents.
The Solution
A subscription box for deaf and hard of hearing children with cochlear implants. Herd provides auditory/oral activities through play-therapy toys and a toy companion.
Made up of three elements, 1) the Elephant, 2) Activity cards, and 3) a Subscription service which brings new toy packs right to the front door. Herd grows with children to aid in their education and development.
The Mobile App
In the mobile application, parents can find pack information and activity resources. They can also receive personalized support from their child's Speech Language Pathologists and school teachers.
Sample onboarding flow
The Activity Cards
Activity cards provide step-by-step instructions for parents to facilitate educational games with their children or for children to know how to play independently.
The Elephant
Taking some of the pressure off of the parents to get complicated speech lessons right, the robotic toy elephant is designed to be a playmate for children to both learn and play with.
The Toys
The toys are made with non-toxic materials and designed with children in mind. While our toys are specially designed to aid with play-therapy for auditory/oral skills, they are also perfect for general early childhood development.
Awards and Features
Want to learn more? Full process details are included in the book.
Summarized Process
With a shared passion for accessibility and diversity, we asked ourselves:
How can we better communicate with people, when communication is not easy for them?
Research
Site Research @ Sound Start, a school for children with cochlear implants at the Sound and Speech Center Savannah
This school specializes in Auditory/Oral Communication Therapy which is instrumental to hearing and speech development after getting a cochlear implant. Consisting of daily 6 hour classes for kids 2-6, there is a 1:2 teacher student ratio.
We learned:
Early, consistent and appropriate use of hearing technology is important
Requires ongoing auditory management.
Families are expected to provide appropriate carry-over of goals, strategies and techniques from the child’s classroom setting and/or individual therapy sessions into daily routines and play activities.
Parents need to work with the child’s teacher(s) and/or therapist(s) to learn strategies and techniques for developing listening, speech reading and speaking skills in an oral learning environment.
Affinitization & Opportunities
Affinitization is imperative to the design process. We took all the data points from every interview/observation activity and wrote them on individual sticky notes. Once on the sticky notes, we grouped them into categories with commonalities, then wrote a sticky that describes what that group is about. After repeating this process several times, we landed on our Key Insights, which led us to our design framework.
Site Research @ Clarke Schools, a school for children with cochlear implants in Florida
This school is free of all students, a big differentiator that incites some families to pack up their entire lives to move closer to one of their 5 nationwide locations.
We learned:
Students are able to FaceTime with their speech learning pathologists which allows them to continue their learning outside of the classroom.
Often times, speech learning pathologists require parents to be included in a child's homework.
Discovery: How children learn
Learning 101
Anecdotally, 90% of what children learn is through incidental learning and observation. The rest comes from repetition, personalization, and a comfortable learning environment where they are free to make mistakes.
LING 6
LING 6 is a sound test exercise made up of 6 phonemes. This test is specially designed for children with hearing aids and/or cochlear implants as it tests their typical weaknesses. It measures detection and identification of sounds and is pinitol to a child's learning and development.
Building Blocks
Speech and learning pathologists use 4 stages to teach auditory/oral processing and they each require the one before. 1) Detection: I think I hear something, 2) Discrimination: I hear two things, 3) Identification: I hear a duck and a pig, 4) Comprehension: I think there is a farm nearby.
Play Therapy
Made up of fun activities such as nursery rhymes, bingo, card games, reading, crafts, and talking with friends, students often don't notice how much they are learning!
The Opportunity
To bring audio, language and speech learning to deaf and hard of hearing children with cochlear implants outside of the classroom.
How might we…
establish and track milestones and goals?
create personalized lesson plans and measure the
developmental progress for each child?
create an exciting and evolving tool to engage children?
bring educational activities to people wherever they are?
give time back to parents to allow them to focus on other
facets of their family and life?
“The worldwide market for Educational Toy is expected to grow to reach 342 million US$ in 2024, from 25200 million US$ in 2019, according to a new Global Info Research study.”
Market Watch
Design
Identity development
Mascot development
Why an elephant?
Long-distance hearing. An elephant’s ears have a range of hearing than can reach more than 6 miles.
Easily detecting sounds in frequency ranges far below or above the frequencies that we humans can hear.
Brand
The Team
