Each of our project teams consists of 4-5 students, in majors ranging from computer science, mechanical engineering, to even neuroscience and architecture. Project members go out in the field and work with users to identify real world problems and prototype solutions. Teams are supported by technical mentors, talented students who are committed to sharing their knowledge and helping projects move forward. From these projects, our members gain real world technical experience and learn to think critically and creatively about tough problems. They also learn skills like CAD, graphic design, app and web programming, ethnographic research, project management, pitching, and human centered design. DFA empowers students to make an impact and provides the resources and collaborative environment to make it happen.
rUIder
Problem: How can we help people with Dyslexia read with more ease and comprehension?
Solution: rUIder (pronounced ree-der is an online reader that lets you create the user interface that works best for you. It is a chrome extension and web application combo that allows users to customize their reading experience and acts as an active listener, providing feedback on users' reading accuracy. rUIder targets fluency and comprehension based on user workarounds and the proven techniques of the Orton-Gillingham method of teaching reading to those with Dyslexia.
Reading is a huge and often natural part of daily life and learning. However, people with dyslexia for whom reading does not come naturally have to train and drill the rules of reading and still often skip lines or words and misread words. This can greatly affect reading comprehension as well make reading extremely time-consuming. In order to address this, the DFA Literacy Team is developing a chrome extension to help people with Dyslexia read with more ease and comprehension.
The Team
Tina Quach
Class of 2018
Course: 2A
Amy Liu
Class of 2019
Course: 6-3
Anna Fountain
Class of 2017
Course: 2A-Product Design
Rui Song
Class of 2017
Course: 6-7
Food Locker
Problem: How can we feed more of the food insecure population?
Solution: We aim to make emergency food more accessible for the working poor by developing a 24 hour contraption that sits outside of pantries and secures the food until it is unlocked.
One in ten families in the state of Massachusetts is considered food insecure. This means they do not know where their next meal is coming from. Currently, the best solution is going to pantries, but most pantries have very short hours of operation and are commonly located in the outskirts of the city.
Since September, we have met with several pantries in the area, and while they admit this flaw, there's not much they can do about it because their operation is heavily dependent on the schedule of volunteers. When we spoke with pantry users, we met single parents who work 3 jobs to pay rent and elderly who have trouble going to the pantry as well as carrying the food.
Our solution is to create a 24 hour food locker that stores nonperishable food and living supplies. These lockers can be accessed any time by a pre-qualified client - all they have to do is request an access code and enter it to unlock a locker.
We hope Food Locker can increase the accessibility of food to those who are less fortunate and offer them flexibility to fit this service as part of their daily schedule.
The Team
Wei Xun He
Class of 2018
Course: 2
Andy Wang
Class of 2018
Courses: 6-3, 18
Jane Fessenden
Class of 2018
Course: 2
Sherri Green
Class of 2018
Course: 2A
Vivek Miglani
Class of 2019
Course: 6
inTouch
All of us have times when we're depressed or struggling, but often, it is hardest to ask for help when we need it the most. You don't want to burden your friends or your family with more things to worry about. But when you find out that a loved one was having a hard time weeks ago, you wish they had come to you or that you had somehow known and that you could have helped them in some way. We are building a phone app that increases awareness of the emotional well being of the people you love and makes reaching out for help more easy and natural so that we can be more present in each others' lives and address potential problems earlier.
The Team
Ruth Park
Class of 2016
Course: 6-7
Jessy Lin
Class of 2019
Course: 6
Jordan Wick
Class of 2019
Course: Undeclared
Mohammad Eltahir
Class of 2019
Course: Undeclared
Nancy Hung
Class of 2019
Course: 6 or 20
Green
Problem: How can we feed more of the food insecure population?
Solution: We aim to make emergency food more accessible for the working poor by developing a 24 hour contraption that sits outside of pantries and secures the food until it is unlocked.
MIT students are a special group because of their ubiquitous mmotivation to make a difference in the world. MIT has not always been the most energy-conscious, making it harder for students to make that difference. However, MIT has recently made steps to upgrade their metering, moving to smart systems that provide expertly-displayed data. Our team is wokring to bring that data to MIT students in the format of an interactive website. We are currently working to put that website together and hope to have a functional front-end by the finish of this spring semester.
The Team
Stephanie Guo
Class of 2017
Course: 2A
Allison Tam
Class of 2019
Course: 6-7
Andy Tsai
Class of 2019
Course: 10B
Karen Fan
Class of 2018
Courses: 2A, 6
Seiji Engelkernier
Class of 2019
Course: Undeclared
Campus Feels
Mental Health has been a serious issue at MIT, with high suicide rates and at least 50% of the student population stating they have felt stressed, depressed, or difficult to function. MIT does provide many resources. People are still, however, constantly stressed and refuse to seek help. The issue with mental health is the problem is too abstract. It's hard to diagnose and find its cause. We hope to make mental health more tangible and give it shape through data analytics. Our product and solution is to create a website and app that will clearly display to the student body and administration the mental climate at MIT in a visually pleasing and graphical approach - aggregating data to create a larger sense of community.
The Team
Ana Lo
Class of 2017
Courses: 2A, 6
Emily Young
Class of 2018
Course: 2A-Product Design
Lauren Luo
Class of 2018
Courses: 2, 6
Timothy Ngotiaoco
Class of 2019
Courses: 6-3, 18
Boo Boo Buddy
Problem: How can we improve pediatric pain communication in hospitals and homes?
Solution: Boo Boo Buddy is a toy and phone application that allows children to visually communicate their pain and help adults track changes in pain over time.
Every four seconds, a child is treated for an injury in an emergency department. To begin treating injuries, doctors and nurses use pain assessment tools to determine the location and intensity of the patient's pain. Current pain assessment tools (1) don't capture multiple pain dimensions at once and (2) only measure pain at a single point in time.
This is where the Boo Boo Buddy can help.
Designed with children in mind, the Boo Boo Buddy is a dry erasable stuffed animal that allows children to (1) mark where it hurts (2) add stickers to show how much it hurts (3) update their boo-boos over time to track recovery progress. Using an accompanying smartphone app, the Boo-Boo Buddy will allow doctors and nurses to track changes in a patient's pain level over time and gain insight into treatment effectiveness. The Boo-Boo Buddy will lead to more effective pain management and treatment in pediatric patients.
The Team
Malena Ohl
Class of 2016
Course: 10B
Lisa Deng
Class of 2018
Course: 6-3
Wen Zeng
Class of 2018
Course: 6-3
Juan Angulo
Class of 2018
Course: 2
Ming Wang
Class of 2018
Course: 6
Allocator
Problem: How can we help homeless shelters better serve the needs of the homeless population?
Solution: The Allocator is an app that helps homeless shelter street teams track information about resources used at specific locations so that they can better keep track of the needs of the homeless.
Our Process
1) Identify a Target Population: We targeted the homeless populations of Boston and Cambridge. We realized that people experiencing homelessness have a rather unique set of needs, and the resources currently available to them aren't enough to meet those needs.
2) Scope Out the Problems: Our first step was to learn about the issues faced by people experiencing homelessness. Through our conversations with homeless men and women, and staff at homeless shelters, we identified four issues:
Theft
Medication Adherence
Shelter and Warmth
Resource Allocation
3) Ideate Ideate Ideate!: We came up with three potential solutions to the problems we identified:
The Invest, to address theft and medication adherence. The Invest is a lightweight vest that can be worn beneath other clothing to provide safe, simple storage of valuables and medications.
The Elemental, to address lack of shelter and warmth. The Elemental is a lightweight backpack, which expands into a shelter at night to provide warmth and protection from the elements.
The Allocator, to address resource allocation. The Allocator is an app to help organizations allocate resources more effectively to the homeless population they serve.
4) Create a Solution: We decided to develop the Allocator because by helping shelters efficiently distribute resources, it could have a big impact on how many people are connected with the help they need.
There are two main features we have in mind. The first involves street teams recording the number of people they see and the resources (food, hats, blankets, etc.) they hand out at certain points on their route. They can enter this information by tapping a location on a map and typing the information into a pop-up box. The information is compiled and then presented so that organizations can see trends, such as the most popular locations and resources at a certain time of year or the most needed resources for a specific location. This will allow organizations to effectively plan for their trips and can ease the transition for new members of a street team.
The other feature is a directory, which keeps track of events happening at local shelters, the number of beds available at various shelters, and the location of resources such as health clinics and food pantries. We hope that if we gather data from enough organizations, this would provide a centralized source where homeless people could find programs that meet their needs.
The Team
Julia Canning
Class of 2016
Course: 2A
Wei Xun He
Class of 2018
Course: 2A with Sustainability, 15
Yooni Kim
Class of 2016
Course: 3A 15
Anika Gupta
Class of 2018
Course: 6-7
F.R.E.S.H.
Problem: How can we increase accessibility of food pantries to low-income, working families?
Solution: F.R.E.S.H. containers are distribution machines that store fresh food packages that families can pick up from the F.R.E.S.H. receptacle after the food pantry closes to make them accessible all day and night.
Hunger is not a third-world problem. It is all around us, invisible and sinuous in the people it touches and and the ways it affects them. The hunger within the Greater Boston community manifests itself largely in households reducing their food intake and reducing the quality and variety of their diet due to competing basic needs. For example, over half of the hungry interviewed by the Greater Boston food had to choose between food and utilities (such as heat and electricity), rent and mortgage payments, and medical care. These choices are unacceptable, because food security should be a basic right. In particular, we are trying to help working families who do not receive enough government assistance to support their households and who cannot take advantage of local food pantries who have limited hours of operations. We are working to increase the accessibility and the availability of food to these families in partnership with already established food pantries and community centers.
The Team
Libby Zhang
Class of 2016
Course: 6-1
Akash Agarwal
Class of 2016
Course: 2
Vicky Gong
Class of 2016
Course: 6-3
Claire Robinson
Class of 2018
Course: 2
Julia Rue
Class of 2018
Course: 2A
Working Towards Education
Problem: How can we help teachers spend less time preparing and more time inspiring?
Solution: An online platform where teachers can source questions and use them to make their own custom worksheets.
Teachers spend hours every day designing worksheets that cover the same concepts that are taught all around the world. While the content has been taught many times before, teachers often create their worksheets from scratch because its hard to find material that matches their teaching style. Our team is creating an online platform that allows teachers to drag and drop questions from a bank of crowdsourced problems to easily customize the perfect worksheet that fits their teaching style and their classroom. Additionally, the platform can recommend questions based on the types of problems they have used for previous worksheets. This can save hours of time every day, allowing teachers to focus on students who need the most help or take some time to relax before after a busy day at school.
