Work in progress - description of a service learning project to design assistive technologies to aid the visually-impaired in India

Cultural practices in India that dictate that individuals remove their footwear before entering homes and places of worship creates a challenge for visually-impaired people in identifying and collecting their footwear as they leave. This paper describes an interdisciplinary service-learning project, involving students in Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Mechanical Engineering (ME) programs, whose goal is to design and develop assistive technologies to help ameliorate this situation. The paper outlines the relevant technological issues in this project, and discusses how this research might be incorporated into the existing pedagogical structure of both programs.