BC Computer Science Team Participates in PerkinsHacks

Five freshman Computer Science students from Boston College were among the 300 students from over a hundred schools who participated in the recent PerkinsHacks event April 13-14, 2018 at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Lurein Perera, Juan Suarez, Jay Agrawal, Yinzhe (Peter) Ma and Estevan Feliz were part of this innovative weekend activity aimed at “solving real problems for real people” using technology to improve accessibility for people who are differently-abled.

The hackathon was structured around the idea of attempting to solve one of the six real world problems that visually impaired individuals face. “These problems and challenges were provided by real people prior to the event,” explained Feliz.

The BC team explored how a blind person might better navigate through dining halls in search of an empty seat and “read and know” what’s being served on the menus.

“This was one of the more difficult challenge categories while also having the largest number of teams competing to complete the task. We had a total of 24 hours to put together a competitive concept that would be compelling enough to stand out from the other teams and ultimately solve a problem visually impaired individuals must face while simply going for a meal in their dining halls.”

The team put together a system consisting of several components to update the users on which seats in the dining hall are available, along with the members sitting at the table (i.e., friends, classmates, etc.)

“In a real-world scenario, the system would consist of pressure sensors beneath each chair connected to an Arduino microcontroller at each table in the dining hall. These microcontrollers would all be connected to a local server which parses all of the data being sent from the sensors and pushes it to the cloud through our custom-built Application Programming Interface,” explains Feliz. “Then, our smartphone app would query all of the data from our server and read out the tables with open seats, with preference given to tables that have open seats and your friends sitting at them.”

Feliz said friends and acquaintances of the visually impaired individuals would tap their phone on a table’s NFC (“Near Field Communication”) sensor and check-in, to allow the users to know their locations.

“To solve the issue of attempting to read menus or other text in a dining hall, we created an app feature which will allow the user to point the phone at text.

Within a few seconds, the application will display each individual character in Braille. The user would then tap around until a dot was pressed--which would in turn provide the user with a vibration or feedback.” Feliz added, “This is the first ever implementation of a smartphone Braille reader application. We were able to have a visually impaired individual successfully identify a letter while using it.”

The team’s final testing went very well. “After ‘pitching’ our project alongside students from Yale, Harvard, MIT, Brown, Cornell, and Georgia Tech—to name a few—our team won first place!”

Feliz reports they've created a website for the public to learn more about their project and to stay up to date on development. The site can be viewed at http://seatsbc.com.

Congratulations to Boston College team members: Lurein Perera, Juan Suarez, Jay Agrawal, Yinzhe (Peter) Ma and Estevan Feliz for their caring and commitment in service to others in the finest Jesuit tradition.