Kathmandu, June 11, 2018 : The first edition of Assistive Technology (AT)-Hackathon concluded awarding top three teams with cash prizes of Rs.80,000 .The nine days event was held at the IOE, Thapathali Campus from 1-9th June, 2018.
A total of 105 individuals participated with their own unique ideas who then worked in teams on top 9 best ideas for design. The best three teams were awarded for their outstanding design focused on improving lives of people with disabilities.
A prototype of EEG( Electroencephalography) based Smart Wheelchair on solving partial/total locomotive disorder by ‘Team Orpheus’ won the first prize with a purse amounting to Rs 50,000 followed by ‘Team B#S’ with a purse worth Rs. 20,000 for designing an google-map like application called ‘marga’ that provides information regarding wheelchair friendly roads for navigation where ‘Team Cool V’ and ‘Team My Sight’ shared a purse of Rs.10,000 as they jointly stood at third position for their designs on visually impaired friendly Speaking whiteboard and and books respectively.
The first ever AT Hackathon was organized by Disaster Hack, a San Francisco based tech INGO, in partnership Tribhuvan University, Curtin University, and PAC Asia, Locus, RAC Thapathali,WLIT, Makervalley and Swopna Digital organ.
Here is a brief introduction of the successful teams and their ideas for “improving lives of people with disabilities using technology” .
1.Team Orpheus
The team presented and idea for solving the problem of Partial/ total locomotive disorder . The idea was design of the prototype of EEG( Electroencephalography) based Smart Wheelchair.
As the people with locomotive disorder have problem navigating with their hands, this team thought of an idea to use of brainwaves for the controlling the wheelchair. The wheelchair follows the brainwaves from the user to operate on the road and is an unique concept as the market hardly offers anything like these. The members of the team believe that the voice and gesture could come out as a troublesome approach for wheelchair control but brainwave could act as an most effective means and they believe solution is feasible within the given time frame. As no such product is readily available in the local market as of now, our solution is unique.
2. B#S
Team B#S came up with the idea of an assistive software with the name ‘marga’: an interactive map application that combines crowd sourced information on places that support universal design with information on roads generated from GIS data.
It also lets handicapped users add their own routes, vote on others’, and in the future will track disabled-friendly vehicles once they are brought in kathmandu.
- It’s a platform for differently-abled people almost like google map.
- Tells you about the roads and buildings accessible by wheelchair/people with mobility difficulties- universal design.
Team B#S behind the differently abled freindly ‘marga’ app
3. Cool ‘V’ and ‘My Sight”
The project was built for the visually impaired persons looking at the possible ways to handle their difficulties in reading books. The Product was targeted for the person above the age 7. It is user friendly and works on automatic system of braille printing.
We have seen blind people struggling with not getting their choice of books on braille or audio format. Braille is the language of blind while reading with 6 dots. That has become a major obstacle for them. They cannot go to normal schools like us. They read books with braille but their technique isn’t that advanced. There are Braille embossers manufactured in foreign but even the price of a normal manual braille printer is too expensive. Small-volume braille printers cost between $1,800 and $5,000 and large-volume ones may cost between $10,000 and $80,000 which is affordable for common people in context of Nepal. In this technological world, everything is improving ,so we designed to comfort the visually impaired person.
Cool V
This project is about making Speaking whiteboard! Education, becoming as one of the major part(Basic Need) of everybody life which is to be reachable and reasonable to everybody in any way possible.
This project (TWB) identifies the travelling at long Distant for many people to get education (Especially for People for Disabilities), and attempt to assist people to be educated just as they actually exist in the Classroom. Though it was initiated to assist people with Disabilities, But it can be very much useful for any kinds of persons. This Project(Talking White Board) is an Distributed system that functions as an intermediate medium for communication between the Teacher and Students far apart. It held the property to share the information between the Teacher and Students in all the best way possible. It consist of major two parties as Server(as of Teacher) and Clients(As for Student).The Server part uses an Board where the teacher could explain by writing and audio which are transferred to the clients side using network(internet) and the Client side receives the information just similar to the board as per their required as per oriented filtered according to evaluation of Registration filled. On the client side, Students are able to receive the following:
- Content on the board can be transformed standard format(Using ocr)
- The text can speak(Text-to-speech)
- Audio from teacher
Since, it is a full Duplex Distributed system, the students will be able to communicate with the teacher in the same manner. Though the similar system has already been in the Market, they are too expensive for many people to access. We believe to reduce that cost multiple time as well as facility especially focus on the Education as for Education for All is one of the major policy of the country.
