Designs to improve lives, from IIT-B students

From designing a rehearsal programme — an assistive tool to help children with learning disabilities understand lessons through games — to tools that aid for farmers and the elderly, projects by the graduating batch of IIT Bombay's Industrial Design Centre (IDC) this year are aimed at improving lives of people across sections of society.

All the projects are being showcased at IDC's annual design degree show from June 30-July 1 at Nehru Centre, Worli. It includes students of interaction design, industrial design, visual communication, mobility and vehicle and animation design.

"Teachers put in tremendous efforts to teach children suffering from learning disabilities. However, there are currently no specific tools to ensure such children can rehearse lessons when they are at home or on vacation. I have designed a web interface, an interactive learning platform that can be used on computers/tablets, whih facilitate acquirement of essential cognitive skills like visual recognition and recall, task switching, working memory, planning and decision in such children," said Shweta Verma who has designed "mind remind".

The prototype was tested with children of SPJ Sadhana School on Sophia College campus. Verma said lessons for such children are designed in a story format, and the system converts these stories into small games children learn from. "Eventually, it can help them rehearse on their own. The programme is open-ended and teachers can feed any lesson in it. I have received a positive feedback and am currently looking at parties interested in implementating it in schools," she said.

Another project by Deepali Chandrakant is for children with hearing impairment.

"Such children always have speech problems and difficulties in constructing sentences and grammar. Called 'chatakpat', the four-player game encourages four-to-eight-year-old hearing impaired children to speak, thereby improving their speech and language skills. It is based on guessing answers and identifying letters. It was tested at Pragati Vidyalaya (for hearing impaired) in Dadar and worked well there," she said.

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