Student Engineering Works Become Products for Disabled Vets

(Washington DC VA Medical Center)

Last year, four University at Buffalo (UB) computer engineering undergraduates developed a software program to enable quadriplegics and other people with limited mobility to use computers productively with one button. The students are now working with a federal government contractor to tailor the software for disabled veterans, and have formed a company to distribute the software further.

Austin Miller, Robert Rodenhaus, Leonard Story Jr., and Matthew Taylor, computer engineering classmates, developed last spring as a class project a software program called OmniSwitch, for people with limited mobility to type letters, surf the web, listen to music and play computer games with a single button or switch. Applied Sciences Group (ASG), also in Buffalo, New York is adapting OmniSwitch for disabled veterans at the Spinal Cord Injury center at the James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, Fla. ASG has a $270,000 contract from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to develop an augmented communications network for spinal cord injury veterans at the Tampa center.

In place of a mouse and keyboard, OmniSwitch allows users to control a computer with a single switch that plugs into a computer’s USB port. The switch can take the shape of a large button, a sip and puff tube that detects air flow, or an eye gaze device that detects a person’s blink. These access devices accommodate disabled people’s capabilities, allowing them to use computers like full-functioning individuals.

The four students started their own company, EclectiSystems Inc. in nearby Elma, New York, to distribute OmniSwitch. Taylor, the company CEO, Rodenhaus, and Story graduated from UB last spring. Miller is a senior.

ASG has also engaged a second team of UB students, in this case two master’s candidates in computer science, to build a speech-generation system for nonverbal veterans to control computers and peripheral devices, as well as communicate with others.

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