PSC Students Create Innovations to Help the Disabled
Posted Feb 20, 2024
Each year, Union's McAfee School of Business sponsors the Hub City Innovation Cup. The Hub City Innovation Cup is a pitch style competition in which teams of students (3-6 per team) from four local colleges and universities compete to develop an innovative solution to a problem facing Jackson. Teams are given an objective during the kickoff event and then have 24 hours to develop their ideas. Teams then pitch their ideas in final presentations to a panel of judges who select winners.
Political Science students typically participate in the competition but this year, political science students created their own team to compete in the competition. The theme this year required teams to come up with an idea, product, or service that betters the lives of those in Jackson with disabilities. Here are the teams and the proposals that they made.
Jack McDonnell, Olivia Shaw, Erilynn Denninger, and Braeden Helmick composed the Political Science team. To streamline the process of applying for accommodations, their team proposed a two-part system that could store and send information for disabled persons. The system included a portal that could securely save all relevant information, such as diagnoses, medications, or documentation, and a biometric scanning function that could access and apply the information to digital forms. This addresses a critical problem that nearly all disabled individuals face when trying to be independent: inaccessible paperwork. So, instead of requiring the disabled to reenter their information everytime they need an accommodation, the portal will provide the information to the company or organization who needs the information with a minimal amount of time.
Cam Champine participated on a team with Micah Diaz and JOnathan Zilkie. Their research proposal to improve the quality of life for Jackson residents with disabilities was to install kiosks in high-traffic and low-income areas to provide access to a database of accommodations at local businesses, restaurants, institutions, and more. These machines would have various accessibility features such as wheelchair accessibility, brail keyboards, speech recognition, etc. to make them easily utilized. Many individuals with disabilities are not afforded proper work opportunities, so the strategy behind the kiosks is to bridge the gap for lower-income residents and break down the barrier between economic hardship and access to vital information. This would come in addition to an app for those who have access to broadband, cellphone service, computers, and smartphones. Pairing these information resources with the ability to use the kiosks to call for transportation services would allow individuals the pathway to match information with action steps to use vocational services, community resources, and medical services. This proposal won the People's Choice Award.
Finally, Evan O'Brien participated on a team with Zane Bolton, Kyle Whitmark, Landon Haywood, Benajmin Kuhl, and Micah Winn. Their proposal consisted of introducing a program that would connect the disabled community of Jackson with the innovators in the area who have the skills and resources to take on projects that could help them. The program we proposed would be managed by the CO, a nonprofit organization in Jackson that serves as a hub for regional innovation. Our proposal was aligned directly with the CO’s three areas of focus: community placemaking, STEM education, and entrepreneur support. Essentially, there are many individuals in Jackson with the skills, resources, and willingness to take on innovative projects to improve others’ quality of life, but they don’t know how to get connected. These include STEM students, educators, entrepreneurs, engineers, and more. Their program would serve to give these innovators project opportunities based on the expressed needs of members within the disabled community. For example, the everyday activities that many disabled individuals struggle with could be made easier or more enjoyable through the innovative products designed and 3D printed by local STEM students and the like. They thought that their proposal would be easily implemented and would greatly magnify the impact we can make in the lives of disabled people in Jackson.