Erin C. Hennessy: Necklace Technology

In my Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction class at Georgia Tech, I was assigned to design and create a fashionable device to help a person with communication difficulties. I decided to make a necklace in which each jewel would be a button for communicating a different message.
I imagined it looking something like this:

From http://www.etsy.com/listing/113798768/free-shipping-fabric-covered-button?

Each circle would have some tangible symbol, like a letter, on it so the user could easily remember which circle would say which message. For example, the little red circle would have the letter "T" painted underneath the fabric with puffy paint so it was tangible but not visible. Then the user would know that pressing that button would read out the message, "I am thirsty."

My first step was to figure out the components for recording messages, playing messages, and button switches. I spoke with one of my professors, Clint Zeagler, about the project and he suggested making the button by sandwiching the conductive materials between jewels. I went to Home Depot to find conductive duct tape, found that it was over $10 for a massive roll, and decided to use foil instead. I didn't want to leave the Home Depot empty handed, and I thought conductive glue might be handy, so I looked up the ingredients for that and bought some contact cement to mix with powdered graphite lubricant. It was not conductive, by the way.

I would put foil on the back of a jewel, then attach foam with a hole cut in it to that, then frame that in a way so that pressing the jewel would allow the foil to complete a circuit and play a message. He said I could use craft wire or conductive thread covered in bugle beads to act as the wires. That all sounded good, so I bought oven-bake modeling clay to make "jewels", jewelry beading wire (which turned out not to be conductive, but I had another craft wire at home), foam, and beads.

Long story short, this is what I ended up doing: