Enhancement of the hands-on, project-based «Assistive Technology Challenge» course

The “Assistive Technology Challenge (ATC)”, offered for the first time in the spring semester (SS) 2024, is a hands-on, project-based course introducing Health Sciences and Technology (HST) students at ETH Zurich to assistive technologies, user-centered (co-)design, project management, basic engineering tools, as well as method-specific, social, and personal competences. In groups of four, students without an engineering background work together with a person with a physical disability (challenger). In those teams, technical solutions for real-world, individual everyday challenges of the challengers are developed and evaluated collaboratively. The goal at the end of the course is that the challengers can keep and use the solutions in their daily life. This course, therefore, offers the students, for the first time, the opportunity to work on a project with an immediate practical benefit and a real impact on society.

After the pilot edition, this project follows two main goals to enhance the course during the upcoming two editions in SS 25 and 26: First, further didactic aspects of the course should be introduced by implementing a more structured reflection on the learning process of the students and the project outcomes. In addition, after each edition, detailed feedback from the students should be collected (e.g., feedback on teaching materials and concept, competencies learned based on the ETH competence framework, and personal perceived motivation for the course), which should then immediately flow into the preparation of the next edition. As a second goal, the course should be continuously expanded by including students from other departments, enabling interdisciplinary collaboration and transfer of competencies within the student teams, and by increasing the number of students (from N=12 in the pilot to N=24 in SS 26).

• Enhancement of the didactic value of the course by guiding the students through a structured process to reflect on their learnings and the achieved course outcomes.
• Continuous increase of students’ motivation for the topic of the course (e.g., through a better understanding of its social relevance and benefits of user-centered design) and their perceived learning success related to the targeted competencies after the end of the semester. Assessment of motivation and learning success is based on the collected feedback after the semester and allows iterative improvements of teaching materials and concepts.
• Continuous increase of number of participating students each semester, up to N=24, (corresponding to six projects). The number of projects should, and can, deliberately not be increased arbitrarily. Limiting the number of students allows for targeted supervision tailored to the individual projects and the teaching of the various required competencies, which would not be possible to this extent in larger groups.
• Access to the course for students coming from other study programmes than HST (e.g., Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Information Technology), as well as ensuring that students coming from different curricula work together in each team. After approval from the D-MAVT has already been granted, starting from SS 2025, four students from the D-MAVT (one student per project) will be officially admitted to the course on a trial basis. Admission of students from other departments is expected to begin from the SS 2026.
• Showing a benefit of the multi-disciplinarity and the collaboration of students from various curricula working on the same project in terms of project outcomes, as well as students’ perceived learning and motivation.

The hands-on, project-based approach proposed in this project combines relevant subject-specific competences such as engineering, user-centered design, accessibility, and project management, with social and personal competencies. Uniquely, this course further fosters the direct interaction with actual end users of the technologies (i.e., people with disabilities) and aims for practical outcomes which can and will directly be used in the real world after completion of the project. This prospect of working on a real problem and the outcome having a real impact is expected to have a considerable positive effect on students’ motivation. Further, this format prepares them well for later projects in their career where they will also not be able to fall back on an off-the-shelf solution.

Conventionally, during group projects in their studies, students mostly work together with other students from their own or very closely related fields. However, after graduating and when working in industry, they will likely often work together with colleagues from different backgrounds. Specifically, HST graduates often play a crucial role in filling a missing link between engineers and end-users or clinicians in the AT- and healthcare sector. Therefore, the interdisciplinary collaboration proposed as an extension in this project is intended to equip the students with important personal and social competencies for their future careers.

As a result of the uniqueness of the different real-world challenges and the lack of preexisting or commercial solutions, the project outcomes further serve as easily understandable, yet highly relevant examples of the involved ETH-departments’ activities to be shared with the public.