Participating Teams

Every year, about 64–74 million people get Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) with physical symptoms like headaches, but also cognitive, behavioral, and mental disturbances, like memory loss and sleeping problems. However, it is often difficult to determine how severe the injury is at the moment the injury occurs, while it is essential to know this to decide which treatment to give to the patient. Consequently, a new method is needed to quickly determine the seriousness of the injury, so the required treatment can be rapidly and easily decided.

Imagine one of your loved ones being in a nursing home. Every time you visit them, you take them for a walk in their wheelchair in the hope of satisfying two of their greatest desires at the same time; socializing with you and being outside the nursing home for a while. Sadly, after each visit, you have the feeling that something was missing in the social interaction you had with them and that your conversations remained quite shallow… After some time, you start to see what is causing this. As a consequence of your loved one being in a wheelchair, nonverbal communication is impossible during a walk; since you cannot look each other into the eyes you cannot see, experience, and react to each other’s emotions. Besides that, when you cannot speak towards each other, also verbal communication can be difficult if your loved one isn’t able to speak that clearly/loud anymore or is bad hearing. As a result, we unfortunately see way too often that something that should be a great social activity full of emotional interaction is reduced to the level of a very noisy phone call for those that are in need of heaving this interaction the most. Since there is not yet a solution for this problem on the market, we gave ourselves the mission to develop a system that allows wheelchair users to fully open up all possibilities for social interaction during a walk.

Individuals with visual impairments face challenges in everyday life due to the inability to gauge non-verbal expressions of others, particularly through facial expressions which are universal and convey emotions. Nonverbal communication cues, such as listening, looking, moving, and reacting, play a crucial role in building trust, clarity, and rapport in communication. However, for individuals with visual impairments, the misalignment between verbal and non-verbal cues can generate tension, mistrust, and confusion. This highlights the need for a solution that enables individuals with visual impairments to access and interpret non-verbal cues to enhance their social interactions and overall well-being.