Weather station for the deafblind

How do you know what the weather will be when you are deaf as well as blind? For these people, who are especially vulnerable outdoors, students developed a weather station.

"For me, it started with an acquaintance I had not spoken to for 25 years," says Jan Kragt, founder of Innovative Power Foundation. "He had gone blind and became insecure because he often bumped into something. He walked very slowly and cautiously through his house and hardly went outside. Thus, he had become isolated. I knocked on the door of lecturer Franc van der Bent, who had the HU students design a hat with sensors. The hat signals when it comes close to an object. After getting used to it for a while, he walked confidently through his house again, and also came outside again. When I saw that, I thought: this is so cool. This is what I want to keep doing. Since then, I have been a client for students. They develop tools every six months that make it easier for blind or deaf and blind people to participate in society. The weather station for the deaf and blind - which students came up with - fits very well with that."

Experiencing the weather outside

You feel the temperature, smoothness, rain and wind.

Lecturer and Quest supervisor Franc van den Bent: "After students from the Design for Health minor developed the first prototype, the idea was transferred to Quest students. In the subject 'Quest', Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Industrial Engineering & Management students work together for six months on a project for a client. These students developed this prototype. By placing your hand on the different spots of the weather station, you can feel how windy it is through a fan; how hot it is, through a temperature plate; how slippery it is through a dial with different textures and whether and how hard it is raining through strings that can tap on your hand."

Franc: "In the Quest subject, engineering students spend six months working on a question from an organisation or company. These are very nice projects because they force students to be creative: 'Create a weather forecaster, but visual and audio solutions make no sense'. That's a wonderful challenge, of course. Which will give you ideas you would never have come up with otherwise. Technology is changing incredibly fast. It is important that the engineers of the future have experience in situations for which appropriate technical solutions have not yet been devised. This is how they learn to pioneer."

Devised by students

"You talk to the person you are making it for."

"To prepare students well for their future, we bring together the healthcare and engineering worlds in the minor Design for Health. In this minor, students majoring in healthcare and students majoring in technology came up with this weather station together. That collaboration not only benefits innovations: healthcare students increase their knowledge of what is possible with engineering, and engineering students increase their understanding of the world of healthcare. With the HU Design for Health programme, we do this not only for students, but also for organisations. Any professional who sees potential in combining healthcare and technology can come to us for inspiration and entry points to student projects, research projects and other partner organisations that want to work together on innovations that really improve healthcare."