Tag Archives: Caregiver

‘Smart Cane’ for Senior Citizens comes with bone-conducting earphones and object-detecting sensors

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Designed to help augment an elderly user’s hearing, sight, and situational awareness, the Caregiver is a smart cane that leverages sensor-based technologies to make life infinitely better for senior citizens and the specially abled.

If the biggest purpose of technology was to help make lives better, the Caregiver smart cane is proof that the same technology should serve the needs of people beyond the purview of the ‘common user’. While bone-conducting hearing and camera-based smart navigation have been available to us ‘regular folk’ for decades now, the Caregiver leverages the technology to help enrich the lives of the elderly. The smart cane comes with its own built-in GPS tracker, radar-imaging cameras, and bone-conducting earpieces to help its users navigate effectively and hear well. When not in use, the Caregiver docks in its wireless charging base that helps replenish its batteries.

Designer: Ma Tianyu

Before I get into why I think the Caregiver is such a brilliant idea, let’s just get its features out of the way. Unlike archaic-looking walking canes, the Caregiver is a pretty slick, state-of-the-art walking device with a minimal futuristic design language. It has a telescopic heigh-adjusting mechanism for people of different heights, and sports a notification/visbility light on the front that glows ambiently to let others know of the elderly person’s presence… although that’s barely scratching the surface.

One of Caregiver’s most impressive features is its built-in set of earphones that help augment the hearing of its users. The bone-conducting earpieces sit within a charging compartment built into the Caregiver’s design, and can be accessed by simply opening the lid and taking them out. Bone conducting earphones work exceptionally well for people with reduced hearing because the earphones deliver audio directly to the auditory nerve via your skull-bone rather than relying on your eardrum. Given that hearing can deteriorate with age, bone-conducting tech provides the perfect alternative, allowing wearers to listen in on the world around them… albeit with stylish earpieces instead of those archaic-looking hearing aids.

Another pretty nifty accessibility feature is the Caregiver’s ‘smart eye’, a series of radar and imaging sensors located around the shaft of the cane that run object detection algorithms to help people navigate safely. The cane can sense when there’s an object in its path, and uses earphone notifications to alert the user of the presence of things that they may no have noticed – either objects out of their PoV or things in front of them that can’t be seen because of deteriorating eyesight. Either way, the earphones let you know of the presence of an object as well as its general location, so the user is warned.

A sufficiently tech-driven device, the Caregiver comes with its own charging dock that wirelessly juices its battery, eliminating the need for struggling with charging cables, ports, and a host of wires/dongles.

The Caregiver cane also comes with its own companion app that can be used by guardians/assistants/caretakers to track the elderly. The stick itself has a GPS sensor built in that helps track the cane, and each cane even registers the heartbeat of the user by detecting their pulse through both the cane as well as the earpieces.

What’s truly so phenomenal about the Caregiver is its ability to make tech accessible without being daunting. Users don’t need to learn new experiences or unlearn past ones to understand how to use the cane. It’s fairly natural and intuitive in its design, and this makes adopting the new technology much easier for elderly people, instead of having them struggle with a new learning curve at that age.

The post ‘Smart Cane’ for Senior Citizens comes with bone-conducting earphones and object-detecting sensors first appeared on Yanko Design.

Gillette’s latest razor was built for allowing caretakers to shave the elderly

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Gillette is synonymous with two things. A. Shaving, and B. Slick Masculinity. It’s difficult to find brands that have the kind of reach Gillette does, in the shaving industry. It quite literally has no serious competition, which one can only ask for as a brand, but its the latter reference that one could say is a narrow-sighted problem. Gillette has and does cater to women too, with its gentle Venus series that runs smoothly against the skin, removing unwanted body hair, but a major part of Gillette’s portfolio caters to the young man who believes beards are for hipsters, and wants to have an immaculately shaved jawline with no cuts or bruises, in record time. In maintaining that vision, Gillette forgot a significant part of their market. People who want to, but are unable to shave.

A masterpiece of inclusive design, the Treo enables assisted shaving, allowing helpers and caretakers shave the beards of men who are unable to. Using a straight-razor was out of the question, since these helpers/caretakers weren’t professionals, and using regular razors is challenging enough on your own face, so shaving someone else can be nothing short of an ergonomic nightmare.

Gillette began its work on the Treo as early as 2017, analyzing pain points, areas of failure, and coming up with solutions to the wide range of problems. Studying assisted shaving scenarios revealed that men were shaved sitting down, or in a bed, which meant that the angle on the blade and handle had to reflect that arrangement, rather than one where one shaves oneself. Since the subjects weren’t being shaved/groomed in the bathroom, there was also the challenge of shaving cream becoming a messy ordeal, given that you didn’t have a constant flow of water to periodically wash the razor. All this research culminated in the Treo, the world’s first assisted-shaving razor.

Designed with a reoriented blade angle, the Treo can be held like a brush or a pencil, making it easier to maneuver across a jawline than conventional razors. A special razor guard allows the blade to work all sorts of facial hair, thick or thin, resulting in a clean shave with lesser water. The handle of the Treo also doubles up as a tube of shaving gel, allowing the Treo to be practically a shaving kit in itself, and armed with enough gel to last for exactly one shave (so that the blade is disposed of when the gel is used up, ensuring a single blade isn’t used twice). The Treo uses a proprietary water-based gel too, which doesn’t create a mess like foam does, and doesn’t need washing off too. The water-based gel hydrates the skin too, working as an after-shave as well!

It’s great to see the company build a product keeping inclusivity in mind. The Treo not only helps caretakers groom and shave the people they take care of, it also allows the men being shaved to feel clean, comfortable, and even young again!

Designer: Gillette

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David Cameron and UK government pledge £300m for dementia research

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