14 DAY TRIAL // This invention is basically a Tablet PC with a portable video-camera. The concept is rather simple: the camera can tilt up, down and sideways and it can also zoom on a target; the Tablet PC is for having a split-screen display, half for live images and half for typing or handwriting. The gadget allows students with visual disabilities to make the same gestures as their colleagues, looking back and forth between the whiteboard and their notes.
The inventor of the Note-Taker is David Hayden, a computer student at Arizona State University. Tired of being frustrated by his visual impairment and frightened that this could endanger his pursuit of a bachelor’s degree with a dual major in computer science and mathematics, he looked for a way of overcoming it. Along with computer science undergraduate Andrew Kelley, industrial design graduate student Liqing Zhou, computer science doctoral student Mike Rush, post-doctoral research associate Gaurav Pradhan and electrical engineering undergraduate Michael Astrauskas, Hayden succeeded in creating the Note-Taker device.
The Note-Taker was developed in the Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing – known as CUbiC – in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, part of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, and research scientist John Black supervised the team. As work on the concept progressed, Black obtained a two-year period grant of a total of $400,000, from the National Science Foundation.
Hayden and Kelley recently returned from Warsaw, Poland, where they won the first prize in the competition for technological innovation, organized by Microsoft. The competition was rude as 325,000 students from over 100 countries took part at this competition. 50 teams entered a category that demanded finding innovative ways of using Microsoft Windows-based Tablet PCs to help people with limited access to education. Ultimately, only two teams were invited to Warsaw to present their projects at the Imagine Cup finals, and the ASU team was one of them. As Hayden's and Kelley's invention impressed the judges, they came back home with a top-prize.
Their award at the Imagine Cup got them invited to the Microsoft Faculty Research Summit in Redmond, Washington, where they demonstrated the abilities of the Note-Taker in front of hundreds of government officials, academics and Microsoft researchers.
The research team continues to work on improving functionality and aesthetics of the Note-Taker. They also want to develop audio/video recording that will allow synchronized playback between the lectures and the typed or handwritten notes, making it easier for students to review their lessons. The device is easy to use, it is portable, rather inexpensive and small enough to fit on a normal classroom desk.
David Hayden wants to pursue a PhD in computer science and was recently awarded the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship.