MHCI Students Work on Solutions for First Responders
News
A team of students in the Masters in Human-Computer Interaction program will spend the summer immersed in the world of firefighters, police officers and other first responders as part of their capstone project work at Draper Laboratory — a not-for-profit research and development lab focused on the design, development and deployment of advanced technological solutions for problems in security, space exploration, healthcare and energy.
An integral component of the MHCI curriculum, the capstone project offers teams of four to six students the opportunity to collaborate with an industry sponsor to innovate, improve or modify a new or existing human-to-machine technology. The Draper team — which includes Zack Aman, Tess Bailie, Ryan Brill, Alan Herman and Jim Martin — will work with the company to identify a technical problem impacting first responders and prototype a solution for that problem. To start, the team has already accompanied police officers on patrols and seen the uncertainty they deal with in the course of assessing situations. They've also conducted exercises with firefighters simulating the difficulties that they experience with vision, hearing and communicating.
Read more about their experiences so far on the Draper website.