Introduction: Millions of adults living with disabilities require assistance to eat. Existing high-tech assistive feeding devices often fail to retrieve food from a plate or bowl, are messy or spill food on the user, and may be too expensive for most people to obtain. An interdisciplinary, multi-university team of occupational therapists, engineers, and adult stakeholders who are dependent on support for self-feeding are working together to develop a novel shape-changing utensil to address these problems.
Objectives
- Introduce the research background, methods, and resulting prototype for a shape-changing utensil.
- Engage in conversation around potential benefits and challenges of the utensil prototypes for culturally diverse food types and dining contexts.
- Solicit feedback from attendees that researchers may use to inform ongoing design of this new technology.
Approach: This work-in-progress presentation introduces the most current 3D-printed utensil prototypes and solicits insights from WFOT attendees using in-person discussion and a QR code for written comments so that ongoing research can be better informed by diverse perspectives.
Practice Implications: The aim of this research is to develop novel tools that are useful and accessible for people around the world for self-feeding.
Significance to the Occupational Therapy Profession: Collaborating on this work at the global level will result in developing a more useful tool for all people. This project also serves as a model for collaboration between occupational therapists and experts outside of the profession that occupational therapy practitioners may use to solve problems in their own communities.