Monique Brasfield
Portfolio and Interview

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT STORY

New products are designed for all kinds of reasons. Some are to improve an existing function. Others are to serve a need. All product designs are special and unique in their own ways. But among the most memorable are those special cases which are created to do good in the world and provide assistance to those who need it most.

Meet Monique Brasfield, creator of Rehabmate. Monique collaborated with LA NPDT to design this special product, which gives the power of communication back to those who, due to medical complications, struggle to make themselves heard.

At a young age, Monique was responsible for providing care for her aunt, who suffered from speech loss due to a health condition. Because of this, she wasn’t able to communicate easily. Out of necessity, and relying on her intuition as a caregiver, Monique created a system in her home where she marked necessary items and provided a map with basic things which her aunt might ask for. Using this system, Monique’s aunt was able to more effectively communicate whatever she needed. From this early seed, the idea for what would eventually become Rehabmate was planted in Monique’s mind.

As the years passed, and the time came for Monique to select her major and future career, she decided to pursue speech therapy in order to help others. Facing the challenges of this career, she was reminded of her early work assisting her aunt, and decided to develop the Rehabmate idea more fully. However, these early attempts were not successful. With a full-time career, Monique struggled to develop the product on her own. And attempts to work with others, who were not well-versed in product design, proved frustrating. Monique nearly gave up on her idea altogether. But the inner voice that had led her to devise the original system, and had urged her along all these years to keep helping others, would not be silenced so easily. Almost unconsciously, it led her to keep the idea alive – and to look for a partner to properly develop it.

The story of invention is often shaped by happy accidents. Sometimes, the solution you need is waiting just out of sight, and it just takes one of those accidents for all the pieces to fall into place. And so it was with Monique. More by accident than by intent, she happened to find the LA New Product Development Team. Having already experienced disappointments with her product design attempts, she didn’t have high expectations. She didn’t even know for sure what LA NPDT could offer, or what the best way to realize the product was. But when she came to ask for help, LA NPDT’s experience with ideation and realizing the results was just what she needed to help transform the Rehabmate from dream to reality.

When Monique approached LA NPDT in 2019, she described the Rehabmate idea as a communication board. Despite not knowing the best path to proceed, she had two key advantages. First, she’d already had the idea; and second, she had unique access to both patients who could use the board to communicate, and to the caregivers who would administer it. This allowed her to conduct research, examine the effectiveness of communications and interactions using the board, and implement necessary changes quickly and responsively.

The idea of what the board should do was simple. But the way to actually accomplish it was not. When LA NPDT’s team asked Monique what she had in mind, she’d always reference other systems… and ask for further evidence of what her patients might be asking for, but not have the words to say.

“I need to know what people want to say using this device. Are there surveys you can access about what patients generally need? And, are there statistics as to what kinds of representational images patients will respond most to? There are so many choices: abstract, emoji, Mayer Johnson, or drawings. What do you think can best convey their needs?” These were the sorts of questions that Monique would ask during the development process.

From these considerations, and from her own research as a caregiver, Monique was able to provide LA NPDT with product design storyboards that laid out her needs as an inventor. The boards were simple, but in their simplicity, they held all the key questions that the Rehabmate product had to answer.

Monique knew what she wanted, but she needed help to further formulate her idea into a viable, usable design. So LA NPDT followed the strategic path that successfully guided many previous designs: encouraging more questions. From the team’s discussions with Monique, the unique questions involved in designing a communication system became apparent.

For example, have you ever thought about which words in a sentence are truly necessary? And when was the last time you considered syntax? These are things people who can communicate easily take for granted… but for a person dealing with a communicative impairment, they can become huge obstacles.

Among the questions which emerged:

• – Should commands like YES/GO and NO/STOP be combined into single images, or be separated? Does it make sense to offer multiple options? Or does that become overwhelming and clutter the choices on the board?
• – Where will the patients place their fingers as they indicate multiple images? Since complex statements will be produced by the patient connecting one image to the next in succession, should they trace their fingers along the sides of columns of images (using a channel, or section of the board where no images are printed)? Or, should they touch each image, then lift their fingers and touch another image? Which is easiest for a patient who may have a movement impairment, and what feels most natural?
• – How many numbers should we indicate on the board? While the numbers 1 through 10 are shown, we can’t show an endless quantity. How can a patient indicate that they are talking about more than 10? Should there be a ‘More’ image on the board? Is there a better way for them to indicate this?

These sort of user interface questions were methodically asked, worked through, and answered in order to design the product effectively. While all this was going on, Monique also envisioned ways she could use the lessons of the product design to eventually make a more complex version of Rehabmate, which could allow for full sentence structure and formulation. This is often the case with new inventions: the creative process leads to new ideas, which could themselves become new inventions down the road. But for now, the goal ahead of Monique and LA NPDT was to make the initial version of Rehabmate – and to make it as simple and easy-to-use as possible.

After LA NPDT and Monique completed the discussion process, LA NPDT prepared a detailed scoping of the work ahead. The team then secured an agreement and a 50% down payment. With the deal terms done, LA NPDT got to work.

1. Monique Brasfield – Revised SOW
2. Product Development Plan_MB_1-31-20

The start of any successful project is knowing the questions that have to be answered. LA NPDT knew the questions. And the team also knew where to find the answers: by doing research. The design team found that other communicative solutions were on the market, but that none of them served the needs Monique had outlined. So instead of reinventing the wheel entirely, LA NPDT took inspiration from the best of each existing communicative system.

Some of these examples included:

1. Picture Communication Board – Hopkins Medical Products
2. abc_board
3. alphabet-board

By doing initial design sketches, the team was able to integrate changes. In this respect, LA NPDT worked the same way that Monique had in developing the original idea: by iterating, testing, and seeing what the results were in the real world, with real communications.

The most difficult part of this process was ensuring that patients could easily understand the visuals, and also be able to point to things they wanted. Just as the question and discussion sessions with Monique had indicated, it all came down to the need to structure sentences.

The process started with these work-in-progress iterations:

1. LAYOUT_V2
2. LAYOUT
3. LAYOUT_V4

These initial design attempts led to further feedback and clarification from Monique, who provided additional visual ideas:

After several iterations, LA NPDT completed a design that everyone was pleased with.

Final Designs:

1. med_work9-1
2. med_work9-1-2
3. Rehabmate 1-17-22

With the design chosen, it was time to move to the prototype stage. Making a prototype allows for more complex real-world testing and validation than a design alone. But it also means that all the unexpected challenges that might remain with the design will at last come to light.

The biggest challenge with Rehabmate went back to one of Monique’s earliest questions: how to allow a patient to guide their finger along the board. Since many patients using Rehabmate are affected by mobility impairments, it was decided that the best system to use would be guide channels, which the patients could move their fingers along while tracing from one image to another. To reduce costs, 3D printing was used to produce these guide channels.

The goal for the product was ambitious: to make it available for less than $1, so that its use could be adopted by everyone.

Thanks to the work of Monique and everyone at LA NPDT, this product, designed to help the world, was successfully created as a working prototype.