HandyMap
An award-winning app to find wheelchair entrances on college campuses developed during HackMIT 2019.
It won the award for best Assistive Tech!
Inspiration
My younger sister Ceanah has Cerebral Palsy and is wheelchair bound. Because of this, going places as a family generally requires finding the wheelchair entrance. Businesses are required to have wheelchair-accessible entrances, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be easy or clear to find, and I found it to be a common stress factor when going out as a family. After coming to MIT in the fall of 2019, I noticed how difficult it was to ascertain where the nearest wheelchair accessible entrance was, something that would be relevant if my sister came to visit. To solve this problem, I led the development of HandyMaps with teammates Rachel Ombok, Vanessa Sun, and Michelle Wen. HandyMap is an android app that shows you the location of nearby wheelchair entrances, as well as the route to them.
How we designed it
We limited our scope to mapping the wheelchair entrances at MIT, which are viewable at http://whereis.mit.edu/ . We scraped this site to find the latitude and longitude coordinates stored for all of the wheelchair entrances, and parsed the data using a Python script, adding Java syntax as we wrote it to a file that could be read by the app, which we wrote in Java in Android Studio.
I primarily worked on the back-end in Java while Rachel and Vanessa designed the front-end of the app, which included a FAQ page and a map powered by the Google Maps API. I had never written code in Java before or used Android Studio before, and neither had most of my teammates, so it was a pretty wild learning experience.
Next Steps
The 24-hour time limit at HackMIT certainly affected the scope of our project, but given the opportunity, implementing the following would be a priority:
Add audio support for visually impaired students
Use machine learning to automatically extract entrance locations from public sources
Expand to other colleges
Add support for community-added wheelchair entrances
See it in action!
Check out this demo we presented onstage at HackMIT 2019