Empowering the Visually Impaired: Team-Based Design of AI-Enabled Assistive Devices with Ebenezer School

The purpose of education is to empower the younger generation with the awareness, knowledge, and skills necessary to address and navigate the most critical global challenges. However, traditional classroom settings and conventional teaching methods often fall short in providing students with the opportunities to engage, understand, and support marginalized communities.This project aims to establish an education program where students can develop AI-enabled image-to-audio assistive systems to improve the daily lives of visually impaired individuals. By doing so, it contributes to two significant sustainable development goals identified by the United Nations: "Good health and well-being" and "Reduced Inequalities". Following the framework of Bloom's Taxonomy, engineering students will form teams to create prototypes. This goes beyond problem analysis, as they will apply their knowledge to real-world scenarios. By partnering with the Ebenezer School and Home, students will have valuable opportunities to interact with visually impaired individuals, gain insights into their needs, and develop assistive devices to help them, for example, a camera with an AI backend that recognizes the value of banknotes and signals the user with audio. This exercise is itself worthwhile because similar technologies have only been developed for use in foreign countries, thus have poor accuracy when used in Hong Kong. These devices will then be deployed in the community for validation and real-world impact.Upon completing this learning experience, students will acquire experiential knowledge in practical, tangible terms, enabling them to develop technologies to address significant and urgent challenges of both the present and the future.