Speech therapy is not fun for children. It consists of frequent doctor visits and boring repetitive homework. Outside of the office, the therapist has no idea if the child performs the exercises correctly or at all. Modern speech recognition is capable of accurately detecting speech impediments, and the speed of current mobile devices makes it possible to use this in a game that reacts and responds to speech in real time. A tool like this on a mobile device will motivate children to practice their therapy exercises while also providing critical feedback and information to the therapist about how the child progresses outside of the office. This tool enables speech therapists to continue aiding children remotely, providing better care and enabling organizations to make an even bigger impact in a child’s life.
m3d is the “Google for Healthcare”—an intuitive and fast search engine for clinical and biomedical research. Existing technology uses outdated software to manage massive data sets, proves unintuitive with drag-and-drop interfaces, and demonstrates major issues in software architecture and scalability. The m3d software solution utilizes cutting-edge technology that ensures optimum performance analyzing Terabytes of data and ensures the most productive user experience. The end-users of m3d include hospitals, clinics, research centers, and pharmaceutical companies. m3d has partnered with UCSF to build a modern and full software solution built on the existing technology frameworks to provide healthcare with its much-needed intuitive and fast search engine for clinical and biomedical research.
Wildfires are a major part of California’s ecology and take a large amount of resources to monitor, contain, and ultimately suppress. Cal Fire is the state entity that is responsible for suppressing wildfires in California. Operations help improve the ecology of the local habitats by protecting rare and/or unique ecological resources, as well as protecting human property. Air-fighting resources such as fixed and rotary winged aircrafts are often used in fire suppression efforts. However, these tools are expensive to utilize and sometimes pose safety concerns such as pilot fatigue and low visibility flight. The goal of this proposal is to reduce the use of full-scaled crew-carrying aircraft by using small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in fire monitoring operations. Their project will create an UAV that could provide 24-hour monitoring to reduce the cost and increase the safety of wildfire monitoring. This would allow for traditional aircrafts that monitor fires to be used for different missions (e.g. water drops, short hauls, or resupply).
This team’s faculty advisors received CITRIS seed funding this year to investigate the activity patterns of older persons living alone, and simultaneously, the capabilities of various sensors such as cameras, temperature sensor, and a two-way microphone for remote monitoring by family members. The goal of this CITRIS funding is for family members or their surrogates to remotely control a robot system over the Internet when they suspect a problem or are unable to reach their loved ones by phone. The goal of this Big Ideas proposal is to make this system autonomous, enabling the robot to monitor activity by detecting utility pattern anomalies. This will allow the system to identify and indicate potential problems and then alert the family members, while heading towards the location of the last utility activity. This project will use a commercially available vacuum robot, “Roomba,” as the base, allow for two-way communication using a mounted tablet, integrate a thermal camera for health data, and analyze the data for the surrogate to inspect and take the appropriate actions.
Both sighted and blind people value having a photographic memento of a moment, a place, or an event. However, due to the visually oriented nature of photography and the lack of non-visual cues to indicate the content of the photo, the photographs taken by blind people are often lacking, sometimes missing the photo subject entirely. This proposal draws on research from team members that investigated how blind smartphone users take, store, and retrieve photos, which found that blind people want to, but hesitate to share photos because it is impossible to identify the photos after they are taken. The advent and ubiquity of smartphones provide a customizable framework that can help blind people capture, organize, browse, and share photos. The overarching aim of this research is to facilitate independence for blind people in capturing, browsing, and sharing photos using a smartphone. As blind people have to rely on non-visual cues to retrieve or organize photos, we plan to test various aural representations of the photos. We also plan to help blind people organize their photos by providing an organization scheme that matches their mental models, which would vary by various characteristics.
To survive, California’s National Parks must become relevant to people of diverse cultural backgrounds. But even as California’s population continues to diversify, people of culturally diverse backgrounds have been less likely to use National Parks and other public lands than others. If the percentage of African Americans and Hispanics who visit, volunteer, donate and lobby for parks does not increase, California’s parks could face substantial gaps in funding and support as its population becomes more diverse. Drawing on ten years of research describing what brings underserved populations into parks, this team proposes implementing ParkExperienceMap, an online participatory mapping system for creating custom visitor and staff-authored park maps, to be distributed both online and in print. ParkExperienceMap will harness crowd-sourcing and paper-based interfaces to provide park maps to underserved populations while simultaneously gathering their thoughts on the park experience. Working with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, they will build and test whether this application can encourage visits by under-served minority groups.
Independent radio producers like the Kitchen Sisters record thousands of hours of sound, but have no system for digitally preserving or providing access to this material. The Pop-Up Radio team built a free, open source archive system with partners at SoundCloud and the Internet Archive, for easy use by producers who lack funding and technical expertise. Pop-Up Radio Archive offers an invaluable opportunity to diversify media access in an era of consolidation. Independent producers of broadcast audio face major challenges: a lack of archival and technical training, a lack of resources, and a lack of understanding about how best to preserve and create access to cultural audio artifacts. Pop Up Radio Archive is a free, open-source, scalable archive system for broadcast audio content, that gives producers a system for storing audio content. Using web services, sound files are uploaded to the Internet Archive for permanent preservation, and producers are given the option of sharing their content through SoundCloud for public consumption.
