Australian Good Design Awards – Robert Pataki Award for Healthcare Design

Published on: 20 September 2024

The Robert Pataki Award for Healthcare Design encourages the next generation of designers and innovators to create conceptual design solutions aimed at helping to improve the quality of life for people living with a disability, who live in an aged care environment and for people working within the Healthcare System.

The Award is named in honour of Robert Pataki, OAM, recipient of the Australian Design Prize (2022) and Life Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia.

Imagine a world where sight through sound unlocks new dimensions of independence and mobility. This is becoming a life-changing reality, thanks to ARIA Research, the proud recipient of the inaugural Robert Pataki Award for their groundbreaking wearable technology, ARIA (Augmented Reality in Audio).

This trailblazing device that turns sound into sight for those who are blind or visually impaired. These sleek, futuristic glasses harness cutting-edge machine vision and AI to transform raw visual data into a rich, 3D auditory landscape, delivered through binaural speakers embedded in the arms of the glasses. This revolutionary technology empowers users to “see” through sound, dramatically boosting their sense of freedom and navigation.

Embodied in ARIA Research’s work is the very essence of the Robert Pataki Award: a relentless commitment to innovation and user-centric design. By collaborating closely with end users, the team tackles real-world challenges and advances assistive technology in meaningful ways. Their smart glasses are not just a leap forward – they are redefining the limits of what’s achievable.

Inspired by Daniel Kish’s remarkable echolocation techniques, ARIA blends spatial computing with AI to redefine how people navigate and interact with their surroundings.

In our recent chat with tech entrepreneur Robert Yearsley, he shared insights into the challenges and successes of developing transformative devices. Yearsley emphasised the crucial role of user-focused design and how Robert Pataki’s legacy continues to drive innovation.

[Winner of the 2024 Robert Pataki Award for Healthcare Design Winner – ARIA. Image: Aria Research]

GDA: What were the main design challenges faced during ARIA’s development?

Robert Yearsley: The first is miniaturisation. It is a major design challenge when developing new, efficient algorithms and hardware technology to compact all this amazing technology into an acceptable package. We’re getting close to the final version.

The second is figuring out how to actually render the world through sound, so it isn’t just through speech. We could put labels on the sounds of objects where they are in space, and just play that out like a fire hose. The problem is, if you look around your desk, there’s probably 20 or 30 different objects, and if we just bladed all that information at you, you’d tear the device off and, because it’d be horrible. And indeed that’s where we started.

So there’s a really interesting design challenge to build a philharmonic presentation of spatial sound that is pleasing and informative. So this is kind of like inventing music, and indeed, we take cues from music, but also environmental sound as well, to make a convincing simulation or portrayal in real time. So, a major challenge is to invent a new form of perception that transforms visual-spatial information into aural-spatial information – something that hasn’t been done before. This is a large part of our work.

GDA: Can you tell us more about the design team behind this innovation?

Robert Yearsley: At the outset, the design of the company itself was very deliberate. The history of assistive technology is more or less what we call the assistive technology graveyards. So before Mark and I started the company, we conducted a root cause analysis to understand why that’s the case. We found close to 60 different attempts at developing assistive technologies for people with vision disabilities in the last 20 years. That’s a lot, including everything from robotic guide dogs to canes, and head-worn devices, among other things.

There seemed to be a common thread: a lack of engagement with the customer, the end user. Very early on, we decided that rather than diving into product design and development, we would spend close to two years meeting with and speaking with the end user about what their problems actually were and what we went up with.

It was a significant leap in design thinking because most assistive technology and solutions for vision disability revolve around trying to correct. What we found in speaking with blind people is that they didn’t care so much about fixing the eye. What they want to do is make their life a bit easier from the perspective of already being blind. And they’re very, very different things. So at the core, we discovered very, very quickly that the co-designer was going to be make or break for the success or failure of the company.

So we invested heavily in developing relationships with leading thinkers in the blind community to inform these design decisions. And it wasn’t just a study up front where we get a list of requirements and we disappear for five years and go build it – that also would have ended in failure. What we decided to do is employ blind subject matter experts, bring them into the company, and part of their role is to basically help us course correct, because sighted assumptions equal bad products.

We have this well informed process where we can continually tweak, improve, course correct and iterate towards the right kind of solutions. And that’s made all the difference for us, and we will continue to do that and build upon it.

[Winner of the 2024 Robert Pataki Award for Healthcare Design – ARIA Research Team. Image: Aria Research]

GDA: What is ARIA’s potential health economic impact in reducing system costs?

Robert Yearsley: One of them is mobility. For instance, the NDIS is delivered through sighted guides. This means paying someone to drive out to your house, pick you up, help at home, and run some errands. This totals about 6.7 hours of service per week, costing close to $21,000 a year, which is quite substantial.

ARIA can potentially complement the use of a sighted guide to enhance perception, but we also believe it will eventually serve as a substitute. There is a significant difference between getting out and about by hanging onto someone’s arm and getting out and about with a colleague, a friend, or even a worker on your own terms. That’s the true potential of ARIA.

Regarding the mobility use case, with about $21,000 to $22,000 a year for 6.7 hours a week, ARIA would come in at roughly half that cost, while increasing access to mobility from 6.7 hours a week up to about 100 or 120 hours a week. So, we go from expensive and scarce mobility to a situation where mobility is cheap and almost always available at will. Additionally, sighted guides are human and need to be booked in advance. Currently, personal mobility has to be scheduled in advance, potentially a week or two before you actually need it. The ability to travel out of your home at will would be life-changing for people with vision disabilities.

Another important aspect is that with independent travel and movement, there are a range of health benefits. Notably, the number one comorbidity experienced by people living with blindness is depression. It’s not surprising – being alone much of the time and dependent on others can significantly limit one’s world. Expanding someone’s world and physical movement can have a direct impact on mental health, which is incredibly exciting about this technology.

GDA: How does ARIA exemplify “The Design Effect” by using innovative design approaches to solve significant problems and impact users and communities?

Robert Yearsley: I think this has been a confluence of good things. I think that careful understanding of failure first – I’ve mentioned before that the assistive technology graveyard is what you really need to pay attention to – because it’ll tell you, first of all, what not to do, but it’ll also provide insights into the negative space, the things that weren’t looked at.

And for us, it was a happy convergence between emerging technologies and opportunity. I’m talking about artificial intelligence here, and, you know, lightweight mobile technology. It’s a new toolbox. Combine that with a really big unsolved problem.

Okay, so you’ve got new technology – think of a Venn diagram with new technology here. You’ve got a massive unsolved problem over here that the technology can enable a solution for. And then you’ve got an opportunity. For us, opportunity took the form of designing and engaging with the end user.

RIA had a massive amount of decline to actually build credibility and trust with leaders in the blind community, and the way to do that was to collaborate, is to actually make them part of the process.

So it just made straightforward sense to actually build a design process around not only co-design but also building by and for the customer. That meant really bringing them well inside the company, listening to difficult feedback sometimes, but fully embracing the problems that they thought were important – not us, the engineers and designers – and basically holding that in both respect and reflection of what they’re asking for and what they actually might really need.

So, it’s the Venn diagram of technology innovation, a large unsolved problem, and this opportunity to pull together the components needed and the insights required to do a good job. So that’s kind of our design approach.

[Winner of the 2024 Robert Pataki Award for Healthcare Design ARIA Benchtop Prototype 2021. Image: Aria Research]

GDA: What does the spirit of Robert Pataki mean to you?

Robert Yearsley: He did some pretty incredible work. And that spirit of innovation in good design that can have a great impact, about practical problem solving, I think is something that should be encouraged.

There’s no shortage of problems out there, but good solutions are very difficult to arrive at. And his work exemplified the work you actually put in to arrive at those kinds of solutions.

As a recipient of the award, I would be pushing for other designers to be thinking about that – solving big but practical problems, and getting to the nitty-gritty of what the end user really, really wants and needs.

In this spirit, the Pataki family shared their thoughts, “The Pataki family is excited to have ARIA Research be the worthy recipient of the inaugural Robert Pataki Healthcare Award.”