Accessible Filing Cabinet (Binder Lifting Solution)

Workers with cerebral palsy struggle to pick up 10-pound binders and soft folders from a multi-level filing cabinet at the CP Unlimited location in Brooklyn. The solution is to create a system that will ease the strain of lifting these heavy binders by bringing them to a comfortable height for all users. They will be accessed through a pulling motion rather than a lifting motion. 

Garden Harvesting Tool 

Smile Farms, a division of CP Unlimited, employs people with disabilities in the agricultural field. Employees maintain greenhouses and harvest vegetables. To enhance the employees' comfort, a solution was designed to prevent the need to exert too much force to harvest vegetables and reduce unnecessary wrist rotation, such as with a button instead of the clamping motion of a regular garden shear. The device will also feature a mechanism that angles itself for difficult cuts to reduce any additional wrist rotation.

Secure Cabinet

At the CP Unlimited main office, documents that need to be shredded are stored securely while waiting to be shredded. The secure cabinet that stores these documents is not ideal for people with mobility issues because it is difficult to bend down and grab documents inside the bag. The solution is to redesign the cabinet that holds these documents so that, when opened, the papers are always at the top for easy access by the user. This can be done by implementing an electrical system where the papers are lifted to the top of the bag. The cabinet will open similarly to a drawer so the user doesn’t have to bend or twist to access the papers inside. 

ENDEAVR (Enhanced Neurodiverse Development and Empowerment through Assistive Vision-based Resources)

 ENDEAVR aims to support neurodiverse individuals in janitorial roles by utilizing computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) to help them recognize and complete real-world tasks on their own by offering an innovative solution through a mobile application that provides real-time task assistance and guidance, minimizing the need for constant supervision. This approach will allow users to focus on completing small and simple tasks to accomplish a larger and more complex overall task.

Bridge.AI 

A simple daily scheduler application that allows users to build a list of their daily tasks and a video description of how to perform them. The application will also use a timer for how long they should spend on each individual task, and we will also implement a text-to-speech functionality with image description for those that cannot read.

SurveyScope

Managers, employment specialists, and staff collect data on participants through surveys. The large amount of data received renders data sorting, browsing, and understanding tedious and inconvenient. This can impact the organization’s ability to handle more program participants, while creating a bottleneck in the time it takes them to connect the participants to outside jobs/programs. The solution is to design a web application that supports the organization's workers by turning survey inputs into manageable profiles and data visualizations. This app will enable workers to manage a large amount of data more efficiently by profile categorization and pattern identification. Those visualizations can help them identify trends in job preference or limitations, and a job filtering system based on the profile created to optimize job placement considering the unique situation of each participant of the program. 
 

Cork Installation Station 

Through a partnership with Whistle Pig, workers with disabilities install corks into whiskey bottle tops, which requires a precise amount of glue and an unaltered procedure for inserting the cork into the top. The cork must be centered and level, or it will not fit in the bottle. The installation station will allow these individuals to insert the cork into the topper more efficiently, creating more job opportunities and increasing production. 

T.R.A.M. (Transport Ready Assisting Machine) 

Individuals need to pack and physically move carts, sometimes up to several 50-pound boxes that need to be lifted and transported. This can present significant challenges for many who do not have the ability or strength to move the boxes. The solution is a unique, powered loading and transport carting system that allows individuals with any level of physical ability to perform the tasks. The apparatus will consist of mechanical and electrical computer mechanisms that will allow an individual to transport boxes onto and off worktables as well as off the floor and into the cart with secure operations and operator safety features.

BlendBot Ink Mixer

A state-of-the-art ink mixer will allow the employees to mix paint in a more safe, clean, and efficient manner. The system includes high-torque mechanisms that effectively mix viscous ink that can be applied to any paint bucket used. The device will consist of a self-contained mixing blade that will thoroughly incorporate the various substances with the ink while keeping the employee safer and cleaner during ink preparation.

Staple Removal Assistive Device 

A simple vocational device or process can remove staples for limited hand dexterity users to improve their efficiency and lessen hand fatigue or stress while removing staples. The number of documents returning to be de-stapled because a few were missed also needs to be improved. The expected result is a functional prototype tool, which is efficient at removing all sizes of staples with minimal to no damage to paper legibility, requires little hand strength/pressure to use, and operates with limited range of motion. 

Can Crusher 

A purely mechanical can crusher that does not require as much input-force as currently available products, and allows for long-term usage. The final aspect of this crusher is to have maximum efficiency. Instead of a worker crushing one can at a time, crushing multiple cans at once will not only save the worker time, but it will also save the organization money.

Streamlining Mail Labeling

The project aims to streamline the labeling process and lessen the burden on disabled employees. The creation of the Optical Character Recognition-based scanner will allow disabled employees to create shipping labels efficiently and accurately for their respective tasks without manually inputting the address.

Automated Document Sorting System 

Individuals with disabilities pack thousands of letters daily at the Center for Disability Services mail facility. It currently takes significant time to package the letters due to the time involved in sorting papers per letter. Another UAlbany Capstone team worked on this 2023- 2024 school year project. Their approach involved building a scanner and identifying the document sets by recognizing the separator sheet using a small camera attached to a Raspberry Pi. The system was reported to have a 70% accuracy rate. This system did not include a way to separate multiple document sets simultaneously, which is essential due to the volume of paper being sorted daily. The system also had issues with paper feeding and light distribution, which affected the identification of the separator sheet. To combat these issues, this team opted to purchase a commercial scanner and then utilize their research and code to pause the scanning instead of using their physical implementation. This way, they can focus more on accuracy and volume than paper feeding.

GLUE: Guided Labeling for a Universal Experience

The project aims to improve a gluing machine that adds glue to a label for bitters bottles. The current gluing device is part of a manufacturing process that takes a blank bottle of Fee Brothers bitters, applies a label, crimps the ends to the shape of the bottle, and places it into bottles for shipment. Automating this process will reduce the shoulder and wrist strain that occurs from the repetitive gluing, and speed up production.