Experience with a multidisciplinary project for social services

Abstract

Orienting projects toward social services introduces and motivates students to real-world problem solving in an engineering curriculum. While service learning has gained traction in recent years, only a few papers in the literature have addressed the development of assistive technologies as a focus for engineering project applications. Over the past eight years, the Collaboratory for Strategic Partnerships and Applied Research at Messiah College has fostered several interdisciplinary undergraduate student and faculty projects, such as the assistive communication technology Wireless-Enabled Remote Co-presence (WERCware) described here. WERCware is designed for those who depend on job-or life-coaching, to ameliorate cognitive and behavioral challenges that affect performance at home or in the workplace. It facilitates remote communication between coach and consumer, for training and/or other support as needed, to increase independence of the consumer. WERCware development, as a collaborative effort between Messiah College and a small company, has gone through several fits and starts including sporadic seed grant funding, angel investor interest, multiple field trials, consultant contributions, and attempted commercialization. These phases have exposed students to technical challenges of electrical and computer engineering outside the formal classroom, but also have required an interdisciplinary mindset to understand the social need and recognize realistic hurdles inherent to getting a product from development to market. Previous papers have addressed the competitive student team member selection process and assessment of the credit-bearing project work in our engineering project curriculum at Messiah College. This paper focuses on WERCware as an extended duration example of multidisciplinary undergraduate project work, highlighting lessons learned by both students and faculty from the experience.