As the semester draws to a close, some students may be thrilled just to have made it to their required classes awake. But at least one group of Jumpos has gained a fresh perspective on a constantly developing field.
OTS 105: Assistive Technology sets out to expose students to the world of devices designed to aid people with physical disabilities. The class takes a hands-on approach, immersing students directly into the world of assistive technology and those it aims to help.
Junior Miki Vizner, an engineering psychology major who is interested in designing aids for physically disabled people, is now working on several final projects for the class.
"One of the great things about the class is that there's a lot of hands-on components," Vizner said. "We learn about building things that are quick, easy and cheap and work to solve a problem — like using cardboard and easy-to-work-with plastic and hot glue and those types of things to create assistive technology."
Jennifer Buxton, the occupational therapy lecturer who teaches the class, has dedicated her time to improving disabled people's quality of life using assistive technology. Buxton became interested in the subject after an intimate early-life experience of her own.
"When I was young I had an aunt who had a spinal cord injury. Just going to visit her at the rehab hospital there and seeing the therapists and all the good work that they did got me really interested," Buxton said. "I asked my aunt which of the therapists helped her most between PT [physical therapy] and OT [occupational therapy], and she said her occupational therapist had made the biggest impact on her life. Even though she's a quadriplegic, she's an independent lady now and does a lot for herself with the help of the therapy."
Before teaching, Buxton earned a certificate in Assistive Technology (AT) from Tufts and trained at the Spaulding Rehabilitation center in Boston, where she specialized in spinal cord and brain injuries. She said she treated a lot of motivated, active young people who were dealing with these injuries.
"[I found that] they were interested in getting back any control that they could over their [lives], and I was interested in helping them do that," Buxton said. "I work in school systems now and with state agencies to improve quality of life for people with disabilities so they can control TV or lights or fans or to return to work if they've had a brain injury or stroke."
Because Buxton learned so much from her experiences helping the disabled, she emphasizes hands-on work in the course. She even includes something that many Tufts students may not have experienced since middle school: field trips.
"We had a bunch of field trips and guest lecturers that brought in the high-tech stuff, and we got to try everything," Vizner said. "I went to the Spaulding rehab center and saw all the power and non-power tech, like one guy who functioned a wheelchair by puffing and sipping on a straw."
One of the guest lecturers that came to the AT class was Rick Hoyt, a severely disabled man in his 40s whom some may recognize as the man whose dad pushes him in different marathons every year. "Team Hoyt," as the duo is called, has participated in 67 marathons and 234 triathlons, six of which were Ironman competitions.
Hoyt used a special communication device that enabled him to deliver a prepared speech to the class through text on an LCD projector. He was also able to respond to questions afterward using a switch that moves through the letters of the alphabet as he moves his head.
"Without communication devices, people wouldn't think he's intelligent because his motor activities are so limited, [but] with communication devices he could give a whole speech to the class, and they all seemed to think he did a great job," Buxton said.
The AT students, a mix of graduates and undergraduates, learned about various types of disabilities and the needs of those who suffered from them through meetings with people like Hoyt and by watching YouTube.com videos.
The principal assignment of the class, what Buxton called the "crux of the semester," was a community-based group project in which students designed assistive technology for a person with disabilities.
Class members were split into groups, each with a mix of graduate and undergraduate backgrounds, and were matched with a disabled person who identified a product from which he or she would benefit or a problem that needed to be solved. Each group then worked as a team to come up with a theoretical solution and then turn it into a reality.
"There were six projects this year, and they're all wonderful and quite varied," Buxton said. "The assisted population ranges from a one-year-old who's deaf and blind to a 60-year-old with MS [multiple sclerosis]."
Vizner took a slightly different route, tailoring his particular study to a personal experience, the way Buxton did.
"I had an idea based on my experiences this summer, when I worked at a summer camp with a vocational educational program," Vizner said. "I noticed that with varying ability, almost all of the kids I worked with benefited from similar audio and visual cues in the shower. So I'm building a device that goes in the shower to show people what to do. It's a life-size figure and each region lights up as it describes the next activity, like, ‘Pick up the shampoo and wash your hair,' or, ‘Wash your arms.' It will be a standalone device that runs on a single playlist, but right now I'm still developing it."
Vizner described problems that other groups were solving, including a computer recognition system that a disabled man could not reboot after it crashed. According to Vizner, the students were designing a ramp that the man could cross on his wheelchair that would automatically reboot the computer.
Buxton noted that work like this can be very rewarding for both the creators and the recipients of the technology.
"Just empowering people is wonderful. I may come into a situation where a person can't use a computer at all because they were never taught or didn't have access, and so they're completely homebound. And I'm able to get them adapted to a computer with an adapted mouse and really see a difference," she said.
