Seniors in secondary engineering programs offer a diverse skill set that can address a myriad of quality-of-life issues faced by disabled children. Multidisciplinary design projects at this level can assist with activities of daily living, health monitoring, and education within the confines of the environments where disabled children seek to thrive: classrooms, homes, and communities. The overall goal of this proposed collaboration is to establish a sustainable relationship between the Kansas State University (KSU) College of Engineering (COE) and Heartspring in Wichita, KS, where design talents of KSU students are directed toward solutions to challenges faced by severely disabled children at Heartspring (most of whom have an Autism Spectrum Disorder), the paraeducators that work with them one-on-one, and the clinical and administrative staff that guide those programs. Seven objectives support this goal: Define senior design projects that enhance student and para quality of life by facilitating activities of daily living, improving student health, and accelerating education. Implement these engineering solutions immediately within the classroom, home, and community environments served by Heartspring. Emphasize projects that increase caregivers' situational awareness for disabled children by quantifying dynamics within their local environment, state of health, and educational progress. Seek solutions that help to reduce the burden of care imposed upon paraeducators, starting with automated collection and transmission of student date. Align senior projects with existing structured courses and independent, special topics courses at KSU to efficiently deliver these experiences and maintain buy-in from students and instructors. Funnel projects through the KSU Student Chapter of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) to bring together students from all COE departments and serve as a rallying hub for impactful multidisciplinary projects. Disseminate the designs produced by these efforts and the associated clinical effectiveness results so as to maximize the impact of these investments on the disabled community. From an Intellectual Merit viewpoint, this approach is timely and apt. The health and safety of disabled children can be improved by efficiency and productivity increases offered by custom and off-the-shelf mobile, wireless technologies usually applied in other business sectors. Such pervasive technology tools can be embedded in learning and living environments to assist with situational awareness and reduce the burden of care. Improved outcomes in shorter periods of time are inevitable. Regarding Broader Impact, this effort will (a) strengthen the KSU EMBS student chapter, (b) generate KSU COE excitement regarding biomedical projects, (c) increase the quality and impact of senior design experiences since design will be immediately tested in the intended Heartspring application environment, (d) serve as a recruiting tool to foster the participation of female students in KSU COE programs, and (e) increase research participation of disabled children, an underrepresented group in multiple societal and research contexts. This effort will also inevitably lead to larger Heartspring/KSU efforts that will increase technology resources for use with other populations that have similar functional independence needs. The hope of this team is to use technology as an "outcomes force multiplier" to help the disability services community (1) reduce the disproportionate cost of special education, (2) increase the resource base available to meet the growing need, and (3) provide solutions of scale that can be implemented and deployed quickly.
Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC)
Autism Research Database (AFD)
