Wes McRae | April 26, 2024 – Atlanta, GA

Tech students are fighting the lack of access to assistive technologies in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation (CIDI)'s new research project.

Zerrin Ondin-Fraser, a research scientist in CIDI, leads the Global Assistive Technology Innovation project, and she launched a Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) team to actively involve students in the project.

"VIPs are a way to involve students when a faculty member has a large-scale, long-term project," Ondin-Fraser said. "I have an ambitious project tackling the assistive technology access gap in sub-Saharan African countries, and this experiential learning program allows students to participate in that project."

According to the Global Report on Assistive Technology, by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in low-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, as few as 3% of the people who need assistive technology have access to it.

Along with Ondin-Fraser as principal investigator, Ellen Bassett, dean and John Portman Chair, Tony Giarrusso, associate director of the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization, and Maureen Linden, executive director of CIDI, form the project group.

"Under this VIP, we have two separate sub-teams," Ondin-Fraser said. "The first sub-team is tasked with ideating for feasible ways to collect and present user experience (UX) data capturing the disability experience in Rwanda."

"When you are a designer, it's very difficult to say, 'I'm going to design for that blind girl in Kigali going to primary school' without knowing the whole context that little girl lives in. So the first group's task is understanding what user experience (UX) data should be collected, so that an entrepreneur in Germany can have an idea of the context that they are innovating for."

"The second sub-team is discussing ideal ways to facilitate the co-design process. It cannot be us living here in a developed country, innovating for people living in low-income and underdeveloped countries with our own mindset of their needs," she said. "It has to be a collaborative process. It has to be a participatory process. How we can create a way for a person with a disability living in Rwanda to actually work with an assistive technology developer in Atlanta?"

"So one sub-team is working to understand UX data specifications; the second sub-team is working toward understanding how we can facilitate codesign."

To help students understand the disability experience in low-income countries and increase their intercultural competencies, the VIP team spent a week in Rwanda.  

"None of the lectures, discussions, or resource sharing would make sense if we didn't take the groups to the country," Ondin-Fraser said. "So that's what we did. We travelled to Kigali, Rwanda, and worked with our local partners there."

The main organization for the collaboration is the National Union of Disability Organizations in Rwanda (NUDOR). "NUDOR is the umbrella organization for all disability NGOs in the country. It works to reflect the needs and interests of its member organizations and persons with disabilities in Rwanda. Almost every field visit we had was facilitated thanks to them."

"We had five full days of student-focused meetings and field visits learning from assistive technology provision experts and interacting with people with disabilities, listening to them. We visited schools for students with disabilities. We visited the orthopedics and rehabilitation hospital. We visited NGOs that promote digital assistive technologies for people who are blind, deaf, and hard of hearing."

"Academics from the University of Rwanda demonstrated their impressive plaster prosthetics and orthotics creation processes, including emerging 3D printed assistive technology capabilities," Ondin-Fraser said. "Since a majority of the students are from biomedical engineering, I chose specifically to take the students there to see what could be a possible future for them."

While students were working to understand the needs of the people they visited in context, the project group was also networking and communicating their interest in future collaboration. "We as a PI group wanted to understand the feasibility of our vision, the feasibility of us going there and working with our local partners," she said.

"It turned out a huge success. Everyone was very nice. Everyone was so open. We are very optimistic about the future of the project."

This project is funded via the Denning Seed Fund by the Office of the Vice Provost of International Initiatives. The support is provided by the Steve A. Denning Chair for Global Engagement, which funds projects creating life-changing international experiences for Georgia Tech students and helps Georgia Tech build a global network of inclusive excellence.