Students of Salahaddin University-Erbil won the best project award in the world in the Huawei Media Technology Competition
Students of the Programming and Informatics Department, College of Engineering of Salahaddin University participated in the Huawei Competition for Information Technology 2021 - 2022 in the field of creativity and innovation. Their project won the biggest award in the world, and they were also the first and only team to win the award for "Technology for All".
The team consisted of the student participants Ro'ad Loqa Hanna, Niyaz Irfan Mostafa and Steven Sliwa Mata, supervised by Silva Hikmat Matthew and Dr Moaid Yousef Batrus and supported by Dr Mardin Anwar, Director of Huawei Academy of Salahaddin University.
Our goal is to make technology more inclusive and try to make that a common practice in the technology community. Our motto is to change the world to a better place for all.
This project is about designing mobile applications for people with disabilities such as visually- and hearing-impaired, or people with especially various disabilities at the same time. The project uses mobile technology as a tool to create a system that can be customized to benefit other than ordinary users according to their specific needs so that they can use the program in the same way as ordinary users to chat and communicate.
Users who are visually- and hearing-impaired at the same time can use a special code (for example, Morse code), the code can be transmitted in the form of mobile phone vibrations for the user and can understand through it. The user can understand the other person and communicate through a Morse code keyboard.
Also, for visually-impaired users, the program can be easily used by tapping anywhere in the program. The user will be notified where he/she is in the program and what actions he/she can take.
And for hearing-impaired users, the interface of the program is different in such a way that all voice actions are removed from the program, especially if the other user wants to send a voice message to the user, it is automatically converted to text to understand.
As mentioned, by using sound/vibration/visual cues we have been able to propose the program to help the user (normal, hearing-impaired, visually-impaired, visually- and hearing-impaired) communicate with each other and with others.
