Everyone is a book filled with their own life stories. How much do we actually know about them? StoryBond is a social media app that encourages people to share and exchange stories, and these stories have the power to turn acquaintances into friends. Our app is a place to know more about the people you have met through the exchange of stories. The story can be an idea, a personal anecdote, or an experience. StoryBond provides a way that helps people connect on a deeper level. Hopefully, our users can make true bonds through writing and exchanging stories.

Misinformation is a pressing global issue; it is increasingly easy to post false or misleading information on the internet and reach massive audiences. Alongside the Center for an Informed Public, Puzzle Break, and The Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA), we created an online escape room to mimic the psychological and emotional responses elicited by real-life interactions with digital misinformation. The escape room aims to equip players with the necessary skills to identify misinformation online and become savvy, skeptical digital citizens.

The Millworks is a Food Campus and Affordable Housing development on the Bellingham waterfront. Community Engagement is needed to gain community support and investment to make the project more viable. Part of the challenge is how to solve this problem during the COVID-19 pandemic when a social gathering is not recommended. Our research led to an online platform where we can engage with the community. We hope to allow the user to make a difference in getting their community voices heard through submitting ideas, taking surveys, and joining online events. This can create a lasting impact on the community.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Chinese citizens are eager to return to their home country. However, the Chinese authority imposed numerous travel restrictions, which made traveling back to China very challenging. TravelSaver provides regularly updated travel and quarantine policies and tools to manage travel plans, guiding users through the complicated procedures from preparation, scheduling for Covid PCR testing to the quarantine process. We expect TravelSaver to make the returning plans less stressful for Chinese citizens. More people would benefit from it and constantly contribute to validating and updating travel plans to polish the information and planning tools.

Over 70% of the UW Women’s rowing team struggles with overtraining every year. We built an application that helps these athletes better understand their training data, and with those insights, make better decisions to reduce overtraining. Apart from analyzing large amounts of training data, we worked closely with student-athletes and team doctors to understand the symptoms of overtraining and define rowing metrics to create a training dashboard. Our Rowing Visualizer aims to help rowers and coaches better understand the effects each training has on team performance to avoid the negative outcomes from overtraining.

According to the NIDCD, 15% of American adults (37.5 million) report some trouble hearing, yet only 1 in 5 people that would benefit from a hearing aid use one. Sound Sustainability’s online hearing screening removes barriers preventing people from determining whether they have hearing loss. To do this, we worked with audiologists to produce a free, easy-to-use, hearing screening that has users listen and respond to a series of tones played at different frequencies and decibels. Our goal is to allow people concerned for their hearing health to quickly check their hearing within the comfort of their own homes.

With the rise of gentrification in the Seattle Chinatown-International District, the intrinsic sense of community is slowly eroding. However, public interest in these local communities can spread awareness, which helps preserve the rich history found there. Wander is a website developed to amplify the voices of local restaurants and promote the cultural significance of Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. Not only will business owners get the chance to tell their stories about their food, but we hope that visitors will also be inspired to engage with and learn about the people at the heart of this community.

Approximately half of the US immigrant population is limited English proficient (LEP). The language barrier leads to stress and health issues and hinders immigrants’ employment opportunities, social environment, and more. Existing online translation services don’t offer further explanation and are often unusable for immigrants with limited education, including low reading and writing comprehension in their home language. Our app bridges this gap and provides real-time, interactive translation help from bilingual and multilingual volunteers who can further explain translations and the context surrounding them, whether cultural or technological. Wave helps LEP users navigate daily life with independence and peace of mind.

Employees at mid- to large-sized companies are faced with many challenges when it comes to connecting with peers and cultivating new working relationships. It can be intimidating to make new friendships outside of your team, and demanding work schedules can make this even more difficult. WorkConnects aims to foster new workplace friendships by automatically matching employees based on their availability and interests.