Undergraduate Student Design Projects to Aid Persons with Disabilities

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0221597YamaguchiThis award provides support to continue Design Projects' activities begun under NSF award #9631744 at Arizona State University (ASC) in which students designed and built custom projects for people with disabilities. The objectives of the activities are to enhance engineering education, provide students with insight into careers in biomedical engineering, improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, and serve the community. The past 12 years of design projects activity at ASU led to the successful completion of 109 design projects and training of 115 undergraduate students in basic design principles. The design projects' activity is structured to work successfully within the environment of ASU. Disability Resources for Students (DRS), which provides accommodations for hundreds of mentally and physically disabled students on the ASU campus, will be closely integrated with the student engineers' work. Ten senior design projects are to be pursued each year in conjunction with DRS to develop the prototype devices. Two undergraduate summer interns are to be supported under the program to work part-time at DRS to develop a listing of appropriate projects for the student engineers. A graduate student is to assist in administering the program by helping the undergraduate design teams and fostering new connections between ASU and nearby communities to serve and/or support persons with disabilities. This project is to introduce 10 to 20 new engineers each year to the daily problems faced by the disabled. Additionally, the disabled community will be directly involved as design consultants and thereby increase the participation of an underrepresented group in the activity.