ECPE STUDENTS ENVISION PATENT
Taking an idea and turning it into a product that might someday help the visually impaired “see” their surroundings is the challenge facing four students in Iowa State’s department of electrical and computer engineering.
L-R: Team mentor Diane Rover with Adam Mishler, Andrew Riha, Mike
Schmitt, and David Lawson, a team of Iowa State students who hope to patent
an idea to help the visually impaired "see" their surroundings.
The foursome—David Lawson, Adam Mishler, Andrew Riha, and Mike Schmitt—earned an all-expense-paid trip to Redmond, Washington, last June, after being chosen as one of only 30 teams to advance to the final round of Microsoft Corporation’s Windows Embedded Student Challenge. In all, more than 250 projects were submitted from universities worldwide.
The group’s product, called RADVIS (an acronym for radio auxiliary detection for the visually impaired and sighted), is a device with an earpiece that announces the name of a person approaching a visually impaired individual. Eventually, the team hopes, the device will have a range of at least eight feet. 
Iowa State was one of only 30 teams from around the world that
qualified for the finals of Microsoft's Windows Embedded Student Challenge.
Although they didn’t win the competition, the students’ idea won some recognition. Iowa State’s Small Business Development Center saw the potential of RADVIS right away and is now doing its part to help the group obtain a patent for the product. With the center’s help, the foursome is preparing for an upcoming business planning competition and is also studying the commercial feasibility of the product. Both tasks, Riha admits, would be much more difficult for the students to accomplish on their own.
Having a business plan might have helped the Iowa State team tremendously when it came to the Microsoft competition. As a matter of fact, Lawson concedes, lack of a business plan was a big factor in not winning the challenge. “I think we made a good presentation to the judges and they seemed to like the product,” he explains, “but they did point out that we lacked information on how we planned to market the product and its commercial feasibility.” 
Riha, Mishler, Schmitt, and Lawson had a little time to relax on
their trip to Redmond, Washington.
Team Sam from Australia won the $8,000 top prize for their device that irrigates crops based on the weather forecast. If the weatherman calls for rain, no irrigation, but if it’s supposed to be dry, the spouts will open.
A team from India placed second, Romania was third, Brazil took fourth, and a team from China finished fifth.
Three members of the Iowa State group—Lawson, Mishler, and Riha—are seniors this year, while Schmitt graduated last May and is now working for Rockwell Collins. Schmitt continues to help the group with RADVIS as much as his schedule will allow.
All four hope to see the project through to the end. “It’s difficult to say right now where this product will go in the future,” Mishler says. “We need to work with the Small Business Development Center and hash out the details with them.”
“We thought it might be good to give this a shot,” Lawson adds about working with the center.
RADVIS uses RFID cards to announce the name of someone approaching a
visually impaired individual.
The Microsoft contest, in association with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Computer Society International Design Competition, challenged undergraduates to devise a computer-based system that solved a real-world problem. Teams had to design, implement, and document a working prototype based on the competition’s theme, Going Beyond the Boundaries.
RADVIS was designed for use in the workplace and will operate especially well at locations where employees already carry radio frequency identification (RFID) tags (similar to an electronic key) to get into a building or locked office.
The decision to link the technology to RFID cards was based on the growing use of these tags.“We didn’t want to make a company buy new transponders for our system to work,” says Mishler. “We wanted it to fit in seamlessly with the rest of the employee population, and we wanted to base it on an up-and-coming infrastructure in security access and controls.”
