Disaster Hack, a San Francisco based tech INGO, in partnership Tribhuvan University, Curtain College, and PAC Asia are organizing the first-ever Assistive Technology Design Competition, the AT-Hackathon, from June 1 – June 8. Prizes are more than 1 lakh awarded to winners of the design competition.
The AT-Hackathon is open to the public and is bringing together engineers, experts, and people with disabilities to create innovative solutions to disability challenges. The event utilizes human-centered design thinking to empathize with the problems people face to invent assistive technology to help people overcome their disabilities.
AT, Assistive Technology is any device or system that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of people with disabilities. Help increase a person’s quality of life by empowering them to live more independent, productive, healthy, and dignified lives with greater access to education, the labor force, and social life.
The World Health Organization estimates that one billion people worldwide need one or more devices to help with their daily life activities. However, as a result of high costs, low awareness, policy, and lack of trained professionals, only one in ten of people that need a device has them.
The Mission
The AT-Hackathon 2018 is initiated to “attack” the challenges that prevent people with disabilities from accessing the technology they need.
- Create real-world, viable solutions to today’s disability challenges.
- Cultivate a community of businesses, universities, makers, engineers, artists, and designers to create new technological solutions for people with disabilities both locally and worldwide.
- Raise awareness amongst businesses, students, educational institutions and medical organizations about emerging opportunities in the area of assistive technology.
- Provide mentoring to makers and students and create a network to encourage them to consider career opportunities in the Assistive Technology sector.
- Demonstrate Design Thinking and the hackathon format as a way of developing products for emerging markets and at the end of facilitating the rapid prototyping of devices that may be considered for further development and commercialization of open source release.
They hope that the AT-Hackathon will generate some new, viable, real-world solutions to people with disabilities. In addition to the competition’s prizes, if sustainable solutions are made, we will be providing business incubation to qualified teams, connecting them with venture capital, business development experts, and other resources necessary to take their ideas to the global market.