College of Business and Economics

Student Projects

Students Develop Brailleye for Visually Impaired

Abdulrahman Ghazal, a Supply Chain and Marketing student, and Jingru Ma, a Finance and Banking student, teamed with 4 other students from Engineering and Environmental Biology to develop  Brailleye; an electronic device dedicated towards visually impaired people, to help make reading easier than ever using the 200 year old reading system, braille. Our goal is to strengthen the interdependency within visually impaired people specifically when it comes to reading and break the standard vision of society about the visually impaired being less capable than others and that they are unable to handle tasks as efficiently.

The way we will do it is by providing them with the ultimate and user friendly reading tool designed especially for visually impaired people. Brailleye is a phone like device, which is equipped with a camera programmed to recognize letters written in various languages. The device has a refreshable braille display on the surface which will be used to display things written in braille by using six dots braille cells. It is capable of displaying texts in the photos captured by the camera after converting them to braille.

The device is built to be very user friendly in the prospective of visually impaired people. All the user has to do is find information to read, direct the device towards it, and read. It is compact, light, and easy to carry around, and has a direction system to direct the user on how to get all the desired information. The direction system includes vibrating motors that are placed at the sides of the device which vibrates whenever the information gets out of the camera sight.

 

Students Develop Medical App Dwak

Prescription drugs save lives, but they can only save lives if they are taken as prescribed. Every year hundreds of thousands of people die from not taking prescription medications correctly. There are billions in extra healthcare costs and it is estimated that 1-in-10 hospitalizations are from people not taking medicine correctly.

Management Information Systems student Yahya Iqelan,led a team of three students to devise Dwak; a personalized medical assistant that creates a link between prescription drug users and hospitals/pharmacies after they leave the pharmacy. All the patient has to do is download the Dwak app, scan a barcode and instantly reminders are created in the patients’ phone. No effort from the patient and no chance of user error.

Completing the team is Yahya’s sister pharmacy student Fatima, nutrition student Shahd Abadlah, and advisor, Steve Kranz an instructor from the College of Business & Economics. The team set one goal for Dwak: ensuring patients "never miss a pill again".

The app they created is designed to send automatic reminders to users every time they need to take a tablet or a dose of medicine, keeping them in line with the prescribed medication regime and preventing the potential health consequences of incorrect use.