HCIIers Take Second Place in Accessibility Hackathon
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Three HCII Ph.D. students teamed up with peers from the University of Maryland to take second place in evoHaX SE last month. The hackathon, which focused on building wearable accessible technologies, took place Oct. 23–25 in Philadelphia.
evoHaX challenged teams to develop wearable technology that could increase the quality of life for people with accessibility issues. The CMU/University of Maryland team — HCII Ph.D. students Cole Gleason, Anhong Guo and Kristin Williams and Maryland students Meethu Malu and Uran Oh — worked with an older adult to help solve problems he has associated with depth perception. He explained to the group that as he's aged, it's become harder for him to thread a needle, for example, or just generally put two tiny objects together.
To solve the problem, the team tracked the user's fingertip locations with Leap Motion, a sensor that converts hand and finger gestures into computer input. They used the data from the Leap Motion to both identify fingertip locations and generate a raw image that represented a depth map. They then created a heat map that displayed the depth and fingertip distances, and projected that map on a Google Glass.
"The team accepted my challenge, self-assembled into a smoothly working team, and leveraged and integrated a number of techniques," said Howard Bilofsky, an international leader in informatics for life science research who served as the team's user consultant. "I was surprised and impressed by how seriously they took the challenge and discussed and explored a number of issues intellectually. They developed an interesting prototype to enhance my ability to thread a needle or, in my case, tie a fly on a line when fly fishing.
"The team took second place, but to my mind were the clear winners and I was proud to be a part of them. It was an honor and a pleasure to work with these young people and I hope that our paths cross again."
For more, check out the evoHaX website.