U-Bot (The robot that teaches orientation and mobility skills to blind children)

In a truly e-commerce and on-demand based economy, more than 25 million US workers perform material handling activities: they move our goods and mine our raw materials, construct our buildings, and create the energy needed to power our society. Last year US companies spent $60bn on lifting related injuries, the most expensive cause of injury in the US, most of which is preventable. Most injuries happen due to cumulative trauma on the spine and surrounding muscles, caused by repetitive bad biomechanics when lifting.

Living in developed countries with superior infrastructures and seemingly unlimited access to the ubiquitous things, we tend to forget: resources are not infinite and need to be taken care of. Current smart home solutions for regulating and optimizing consumption give little to no information to the user on their behavior and routine. Although every device in our home is a data touchpoint, hardly any of this is reflected in our living space, where we most need it.

During their treatment, many child cancer patients are isolated for medical reasons. During this period, they often feel quite well, and are very willing to play and to make contact with peers, but because they are not allowed to leave their rooms, they have no way to do so. Direct contact and play with peers is crucial for normal social development, but in some cases, isolation can take up to 4 months, which roughly disrupts this normal social development.

Introducing Alvio, a breathing trainer that acts like a game controller. But instead of using your thumbs, you control the game with your breath. Alvio tracks your progress while you play. And because it’s fun, kids keep playing, and getting healthier. Inhaling and exhaling moves characters up and down to hit targets.

No longer a privilege for the few, access to 17 of the world's most treasured museums is now available to anyone with an internet connection. Google Art Project welcomes us to the halls of London's Tate Britain, Madrid's Reina Sofia, St. Petersburg's Hermitage. See The Birth of Venus in Florence then Starry Night in New York -- from a curator's perspective, down to each microscopic crack in the canvas. The remarkably elegant and intuitive interface feels perfectly on-brand for Google, without distracting from the visually rich content on the site. Visitors can move through the museums on an interactive floor plan, choose the works they'd like to see and read informative curator's notes. It's immersive. Personal. Beyond digital, it's a real-life experience.

In 2014, The City of New York issued a Request for Proposal that called on the technology and media community to reimagine the City’s obsolete payphone infrastructure, and bring free public Wi-Fi to the streets of New York to help bridge a growing digital divide. As a result, a groundbreaking public-private partnership formed between the City of New York and a consortium of private companies to launch LinkNYC in January 2016, the largest and fastest free public Wi-Fi network in the world. Replacing more than 7,500 outdated payphones, each Link delivers free high-speed gigabit Wi-Fi, phone calls, USB ports for device charging, a touch screen tablet for internet browsing and wayfinding, 911 emergency button, and a platform for civic and commercial applications, bringing connectivity and digital touchpoints to every community and commercial street corner across New York City.

Physiotherapy is all about movements. To assess patients, physiotherapists must be able to closely observe the subtle differences in patient’s movements, e.g., shifts in weight distribution while walking. Over the last decade, Australian physiotherapists are increasingly relying on video consultations to treat patients living in remote and rural areas. Such consultations are organised using video conferencing tools like Skype. Video consultation is particularly important in Australia because of its large distributed population and the increasing prevalence of long-term conditions like chronic pain.

Long before I decided to study multimedia design, I had a strong interest in the intricate nature of fractal structures. Years later, I decided to give it another try with all the knowledge about design and especially user interfaces and interaction I had earned. A major challenge was to find a balance between enabling graphical complexity versus reducing interface complexity. The mathematics and algorithms behind Iterazer have lots of dependencies and meaningful settings, but I strived to focus on the central aspect of what appaled to me the most - the graphical patterns emerging from interaction. Iterazer enables people to harness graphical complexity in a novel, very intuitive and compelling way. Another challenge was to find a way to handle the generated images in a way that felt natural and differ from the files, folders and lists used by today’s applications.

With the service provider Good-Loop, newspaper readers can connect to content moderators to help them slow down the rapid spread of online dis-/misinformation. The fake news in its present form has evolved and become more challenging to identify: Synthetic dis-/misinformation is treated the same as all other internet content, showing up in search results & social media. Without the infrastructure in place, content moderators will find it hard to distinguish between real and A.I. manipulated audio files, texts, images, & videos.

Stories play an intrinsic part of our lives, society, and culture. We all make and tell stories to connect to others, share our emotions and express ourselves. Storytelling fosters positive role in a child’s physical and cognitive development from the small age. Children use simple media like pen/paper or wooden blocks to sophisticated online software like Scratch or electronic toys like Lego Mindstorms to imagine and create stories. Stic Stac (pronounced as Stick Stack) is a new way of making stories. It is a storymaking tool that allows children in the age group 9-14 years to create unique stories using tangible blocks and augmented reality.