(Spring semester only)

The Assistive Technologies Challenge, will give students the opportunity to design and develop meaningful technological solutions for and with people with disabilities. The challenge aims at giving the students first hand experience in working with real end-users and to understand how their skills and abilities can have a positive impact on society.

The challenge will be offered as a group semester project and is open to all sections within STI (SGM, SMT, SEL, SMX), NX, SV and IC.

Multidisciplinary teams of 4 students will be assigned a "challenger" with a specific need to solve an everyday challenge. By adopting a "user-in-the-loop" approach, the students will translate these needs into tangible goals. Over the course of several iterations, they will work towards achieving these goals by following an established product design methodology for medical devices.

A project assistant will advise each team by monitoring their progress and providing them guidance during the semester. Furthermore, the students will participate in interactive workshops focused on user-centric design, prototyping methods, project resource management, and the ethical considerations of working with humans within the sphere of medical technologies. The teams will have access to prototyping facilities, and will be assigned a gracious budget to purchase materials & services.

6 projects are proposed to students in Spring 2024:

P1: adaptation of Latex editor for a visually impaired student: This project aims at adapting a Latex editor to help a student with visual deficiency to check her scientific reports. She commonly uses screen readers to access course documentation, but she struggles checking her own reports when including mathematical formulas. She is very resourceful and motivated to work with a team on her challenge!

P2: video games for visually impaired players The aim of the project is to adapt video games, or more generally electronic games, for the visually impaired by adding dimensions such as touch. The challenger is 35-year-old, whose vision was reduced to less than 10% per eye a few years ago. What's more, he can't hear well out of one ear. The project has already been discussed at a hackathon.

P3: adaptation of a foosball table for children with various disabilities This project is being run in conjunction with La Cassagne Special School. It involves adapting a table football to make it more inclusive. Different children with different types of disability will have to be able to play together through different means of interaction with the players, involving the potential motorisation of the foosball table. You will be working with an occupational therapist on site and at least two children to try things out regularly.

P4: Helpie, an app to help mental impaired people to travel alone This project is proposed in collaboration with SBB. The goal is to develop an app that helps mental impaired people to travel serenely alone. SBB inclusive app team will provide support to get and provide simplified information from their app. The challenger will specify his needs to personalise the solution.

P5: adaptation of interactive games for children with various disabilities This project is being run in conjunction with La Cassagne Special School. Its aim is to create an interactive game platform enabling children with different levels of motor and cognitive disability to interact together in a recreational way. This is to be done through physical objects such as small cars, using different controls adapted to the greatest number of people. You will be working with an occupational therapist on site and at least two children to try things out regularly.

P6: adaptation of a video game controllers This project aims at adapting video game controllers to make them more inclusive. Video game controllers are indeed a challenge for anyone with a motor disability, especially when it comes to using two joysticks to combine precision and speed. The challenge is then to rethink the structure of classic joysticks, while still allowing the same functionality. You'll be working with an adult gamer with hemiplegia who's no stranger to video games, but also to challenges!