99P Labs’ Universal Basic Mobility Challenge at HackOHI/O 2022
Introduction
On October 8–9, 2022, OHI/O, a student organization at The Ohio State University, hosted its tenth-anniversary HackOHI/O hackathon. 99P Labs is a proud sponsor of both OHI/O and HackOHI/O and was pleased to participate in the event by offering a challenge. This post is a recap of the event, the challenge 99P Labs offered, the submissions we received, and a thank you note for all those who participated.
The Event
HackOHI/O is a hackathon where students form teams of up to four members to take on a problem-solving challenge for prizes. The teams had their choice of choosing from one of the five challenges. You can find them here if you want to see more about the available challenges. This year 150 teams registered, and 76 teams made submissions.
The event started Saturday morning; each team worked on their project for 24 hours straight and submitted a project on Sunday morning. The atmosphere felt just standing in the ballroom with all those students working under such a time constraint to solve problems was unbelievable. And as you will soon see, the skill, creativity, and grit the participants showcased with their submissions were astonishing.
One of the best parts of this experience for the 99P Labs’ team was the ability to get the chance to meet so many of the students and work with them as they brainstormed and got their projects up and running. Seeing how people have such unique ways of approaching problem-solving is amazing.
99P Labs’ Challenge
We chose Universal Basic Mobility as the challenge topic we were going to offer. We were hoping the topic would be interesting to most of the participants. I have written about our evolving strategy around trying to write better hackathon challenges; you can read about it here if interested. The extra care we took in designing the problem statement paid off because we received more submissions to our challenge than ever before. The 99P Labs’ challenge received 25 of the 76 total team submissions.
So what is Universal Basic Mobility? Briefly stated, Universal Basic Mobility is the idea that everyone deserves a wide range of mobility options, regardless of socioeconomic status, age, disability, or location. Please check out our blog post here if you would like a deeper look into Universal Basic Mobility.
The hard part with a topic this board was communicating it in a way that gave the participants enough of a path to get started but not too many constraints it would limit creativity. Therefore, the official wording of our challenge asked the participants to:
Use technology to solve a mobility problem in the spirit of Universal Basic Mobility.
By “technology,” we assumed a web/mobile application but were open to a broader conception, so there were no technological constraints on what to build or how to build it.
By “mobility problem,” we just meant any situation where someone wants to get somewhere.
We all constantly face mobility problems. The students needed to solve a mobility problem to get to the hackathon. They were at one place earlier in the day and had to get to the hackathon. What thought process went into deciding how they got from where they were to where they ended up? Could their trip have been better? What does better mean in this context? Better for the environment, cheaper, easier, more accessible, or less mentally stressful; there are countless ways to interpret better.
And we thought this was the simplest way to approach the challenge. First, brainstorm and look at mobility problems; they could be ones the students have in real life, like getting to class, getting to work, going shopping for groceries, going home to visit family, or going to hang out with friends.
Or they could be some envisioned empathetic situation where they imagined what a mobility problem was like for some other person — like an elderly person who needs to get to the doctor but can’t drive, someone who needs to get to work but doesn’t have a car, someone who needs to ride a bus but has crippling social anxiety, or someone who has a vision impairment and needs to cross numerous tricky traffic situations to get to class.
Then think about how they could make that trip better. For example, could some functionality or application be hacked to improve their identified mobility problem?
Now one possible problem when making a challenge problem that is so conceptual is it runs a risk of being too open-ended which could cause two different types of problems. On the one end, it could cause people not to choose to do it because there aren’t enough signposts. Some people feel more comfortable working on questions with checkboxes so they can always know what needs to be done to finish the project. Conversely, some people love the ability to be creative so much they could make a project that goes so far away from the initial prompt it isn’t even loosely connected to the prompt at the end.
Fortunately, we didn’t experience either of those types of problems. Instead, the students interpreted the prompt as we hoped they would and created some amazing projects.
Submissions
As I mentioned above, we received 25 submissions for our challenge. The projects differed in how they attempted to solve a mobility problem, but all the projects could be separated into three general categories: conceptual, application, and hardware. These were not categories the students were given beforehand it just seems to best represent the differences between the projects.
The projects in the first category solved a mobility problem conceptually. We received ten projects in the conceptual category: DrunkDrivingTest, Bark, Pulse and Glide Adaptive Cruise Control, Sidewalk Object Detection for the Visually Impaired, Bus Occupany Tracker, Lazy Calendar, Dungeon Crawler, Transit Bandit, A2B, and mapSecure.
The projects in the second category solved a mobility problem by designing and developing an application. We received eleven projects in the application category: UC-4-ME, Walk Safe, Road Safety Predictor, Team Red, BookNook, Autonomous Traffic Control, enterOSU, Blue Light Emergency Tracker, Optimal, and enRoute.
Finally, the projects in the third category solved a mobility problem by implementing hardware. We received four projects in the hardware category: De-Distracted Driving, ICU-CAR, Blind Assist Sensory Device, and Singular Glove of Malphon.
If you want to see these projects' video presentations, here is a link to a YouTube playlist with all the project presentations.
While we were blown away by the number of excellent projects we received, we had to pick three projects to highlight and award prizes. All three of our prize winners’ projects were amazing in their ability to clearly frame a mobility problem and in their display of the skill necessary to deliver such a polished project in a single day.
The project we awarded the first prize was UC-4-ME. They created an audio-assisted navigation application. The app utilizes a Navigator that records waypoints along a path from a start to a destination. The Adventurer would then follow the audio cues provided by the app to avoid obstacles and follow the steps to their destination safely. The goal is not to replace their existing facilities but to act as an enhanced aid.
We had a tie for second place. The second prize project was De-Distracted Driving. Using hardware, they could detect when drivers are distracted inside a car and give a warning to alert them to pay attention. First, they collected the dataset by recording good and bad driving examples. Then they trained a yolov5 model to recognize the difference between distracted and good driving behavior. When a person is engaged, calming blue and green lights come on. When a person is distracted, first, a red light turns on, then a buzzer, and finally, a vibration to get them to pay attention to the road.
Walk Safe was the other second-prize winner. They created a web application that allowed users to match with other users walking alone around campus with a similar route to enable them to walk together to increase overall safety. In addition, it included a verification process to limit the users to OSU students, and relevant analytics can be shared with campus safety groups to help avoid dangerous situations.
Conclusion
We want to thank everyone at OHI/O who set up and ran the event; they did a fantastic job.
We also want to thank all the competitors, especially those who chose our challenge, for taking a weekend to problem-solve and create a welcoming community. We had a fantastic time meeting and working with you on your projects. We hope you come by and see us at every OHI/O event. Especially Data I/O, we will offer a challenge there too.
Thank you so much for reading this post, and please do not hesitate to reach out by leaving a comment. I would love to engage in a conversation. Also, if you are interested in the intersection of future mobility and data, I invite you to look at some of the other 99P Labs posts.
