Team: Tina Quach (Team Lead), Amy Liu, Anna Fountain, Kevin Palisoc, Rui Song
How can we make reading easier for those with Dyslexia and/or ADHD?
Our Literacy team worked to create a tool to help people with Dyslexia and/or ADHD read with more ease and comprehension. To do this, they made an online reader that lets you create the user interface that works best for each user. Their product is called “rUIder”, a web app that is highly customizable e-reader that presents in a way that helps readers focus and read more fluently. To make sure that their program is efficient, they performed online research and interviews with people with dyslexia or ADHD, parents of those people, tutors, teachers, researchers, and local organizations where dyslexics come together.
Team: Stephanie Guo (Team Lead), Seiji Engelkemier, Karen Fan, Allison Tam
How can we make being energy aware at MIT easier?
Our Green Team 2015-2016 worked to make MIT students care about the environment and be aware of their environmental impact.
MIT has traditionally had a hands-off approach to energy monitoring. MIT’s system used to involve paying people to come monthly and manually take down energy numbers that were archived and not used for analysis.
However, MIT’s new system OSI PI updates data real-time to a virtual cloud, Sandbox, that will give anyone with access an abundance of useful energy data that can be analyzed. With this in mind, the Green Team worked to create an app to increase student awareness and make energy conservation more interactive. It would provide a shortcut of sorts between mit students and data about how much resources they use and, importantly, the direct impact their actions have.
Team: Ruth Park (Team Lead), Jessy Lin, Jordan Wick, Nancy Hung, Mo Eltahir
Problem: How can we boost positivity for individuals by increasing awareness of and connectivity to loved ones? Solution: inTouch is a webapp and phone app that helps you be 1. more in touch with yourself through mood tracking 2. more in touch with your loved ones by making it easier to keep up with their emotional states and a smart prompting system which encourages you to meet up in person 3. more in touch with positivity through a delayed messaging system which allows users to send positive and encouraging messages to their loved ones that they open when they’re feeling particularly negative.
Team: Rosa Ruiz (Team Lead), Wei Xun He (Team Lead), Andy Wang, jane Fessenden, Sherri Green, Vivek Miglani
How can we reduce food insecurity in Massachusetts?
Our Food Waste team worked to create a secure food locker to act as a resource for underserved communities.
1/10 households in Massachusetts suffer from food insecurity. Many rely on pantries, but pantries are far, food is heavy, kids can’t stay home alone, and hours are limited. Food Secure is a food locker for nonperishables and toiletries. The design proposal is insulated with foam and/or mylar with an weatherproof, plastic exterior. Food secure can be individual or communal, and would be refilled regularly by pantries. It would be located by T stops, parking garages, or existing pantries and opened by either calling in for a code or an app that detects and opens the locker. Food Secure’s goal is to save time and energy while ensuring a supply of healthy food and toiletries.
Team: Ana Lo, Emily Young, Lauren Luo, Timothy Ngotiaoco
Problem: How can we decrease stigma around mental health and create awareness about how the student body is feeling? Solution: Create a website that allows student input to create a graphical representation of the emotional climate at any given time period. We want to use this to create a tangible representation of Mental Health on campus. We think that making mental health less abstract is the key to reducing stigma and important in the push for better mental health.
MIT is a top tier school that offers a set of very challenging courses. As a result, students often end up feeling stressed about certain classes and events on campus. Compared to the 6.5-7.5 national average of suicides per 100k students, the MIT suicide rate was 10.17. While there are a lot of resources available for those struggling with mental health, there are still students who do not seek help. There is also a general a lack of tangibility of mental climate at MIT.
In order to make mental health more understandable to the MIT community, our Campus Feels team created a website and app that clearly displayed the current mental climate at MIT in a visually pleasing and graphical approach. The ultimate goal was to help the MIT community realize that there is a serious mental health problem at MIT, show administrators the main source of stress, and help students support each other.