Hearing impairment is a common health issue among seniors in the US. Due to social stigma, costliness, and limited awareness, many do not seek help with their hearing health in time, or even at all. Moreover, the cost of hearing aids and audiologist appointments costs thousands even with insurance. Additionally, present smart technology pairing solutions are either unsuccessful, or designed inefficiently. Working with Sound Sustainability, a hearing health company, our project aims to not only provide resources for affordable OTC hearing aids, but also develop an easy-to-use mobile app that pairs with hearing devices and allows for easy consumer control.

A 2019 CDC report states that 35% of Americans living with a disability suffer from a condition that directly affects their ability to navigate webpages and platforms. And there aren’t nearly enough websites that address that accessibility problem. Smartsheet was invested in changing that and wanted to kickstart research on improving the accessibility and usability experience of its resource management platform - 10,000ft. As part of our solution, we studied impacted user groups, the issues they encountered, and created a framework to address accessibility problems in the future.

Inked Sports is a start-up helping collegiate athletes achieve name, image, and likeness (NIL) success through branding opportunities in anticipation of forthcoming NCAA legislation. This new legislation will allow college athletes to profit off their NIL. Our team created a dashboard for our sponsor to provide insights to potential brand partners looking to work with college athletes. The dashboard includes information such as audience location, reach, and impressions for both athletes and custom campaigns. The resulting dashboard contributes to the start-up’s larger effort to help collegiate athletes generate well-deserved income.

Learning science is hard: active learning in science class is rare. Few parents are confident teaching their kids at home, and there are minimal opportunities for kids to engage in the science community. Marine Rescue provides a fun way for kids to learn about marine animals and debris through interactive stories and minigames. Players learn research vocabulary and practice contributing to citizen science by classifying real marine debris photos from Washington beaches. Our content was developed following child-centered design and in collaboration with COASST researchers. Marine Rescue has been well-received and is an effective platform for kids to learn science at home.

Our earth is at a critical stage where everyone of us should contribute to protect our land. In the U.S., 28% of greenhouse gas emissions are caused by transportation, and 40 million tons of food are wasted every year in the states. LEAF, a web application that offers three main features, would make real differences. Record, analyze, and off-sets your carbon emission. Every step you take to offset your carbon footprint would be resulting in a tree in real life. We hope to build a community for people to do something real to help the environment.

Improving and maintaining our mental wellbeing is a constant uphill battle that is often overlooked. After a difficult year, many are recognizing the importance of mental wellness and the effort needed to maintain it. Research shows that although many are becoming increasingly aware of its importance, few know where to start. For some, reflection can be an important first step. Leafy uses a gamified approach to mental wellness through reflection and journaling. Although everyone approaches their own wellbeing differently, we hope that Leafy will encourage users to be mindful of their mental wellness through journaling and intentional reflection.

Our team worked with the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning product team to improve the retention of deeply engaged customers on the AML platform. The project involved both qualitative and quantitative analysis of customer usage patterns, including customer interviews, telemetry data analysis, hypothesis building and testing. The result of our analysis serves as a good foundation to understand the needs and pain points of the customers and to come up with strategic ways of moving forward. It has the potential to help improve the user experience of the AML platform and allow AML to gain more competitive advantages in the market.

Have you ever had the experience that you unlock your phone, scroll through a few pages of the home screen and don’t know what to do or which app you are going to use? This is the gap we are trying to fill in with MIRRO. Thanks to its recommendation algorithm, MIRRO will help you locate your preferred content, music, news, games, shows and faster. What you need to do is telling MIRRO how much time you have, and it will take care of the rest. With MIRRO, great content has never been easier to find!

Portable air cleaners can provide additional protection against the spread of COVID-19 in small businesses, but it’s difficult for business owners to determine if an air cleaner will effectively ventilate their space. PACC is a web application based on research from air quality experts at Harvard University and University of Colorado Boulder that helps users find affordable and effective air cleaners. Sponsored by the Washington State Department of Commerce, our application lessens the burden on small businesses by providing a user-friendly website with a simplistic design. Our tool helps businesses operate safely and protects the health of employees and customers.

Currently, the iSchool capstone archive is stagnant and fails to facilitate connections with industry partners and showcase students’ work beautifully. It is difficult to navigate and find interesting projects, and the project pages show a limited view of the team’s work. We decided to redesign the navigation to allow users to excitingly explore projects, and make an individual project page that gives students flexibility in displaying content. With our redesign, audiences and potential sponsors can find projects easily and students are able to show projects in a richer way, which allows the website to be more accessible and useful.