TEDY (Technologies for the Elderly and Disabled people by Youths) is one of the education and community programmes under the Jockey Club Enhancing Youth Empathy Project through Immersive Visualisation. It aims at cultivating a stronger sense of social responsibility and empathic understanding among students for the elderly and people living with disabilities. The programme incubates students’ original ideas and innovative designs for technologies that create social innovations. By bringing students and the target beneficiaries together, custom-designed rehabilitation aids can be made to solve daily problems and improve the quality of life.
We believe that this programme will contribute to society by promoting both desirable virtues and awareness of the lives of members of the aged and disabled community.
Kindness and empathy are the key qualities of future social innovators. By connecting students with target beneficiaries through workshops and visits, students will better understand the difficulties faced by the elderly and people with disabilities. We believe it will evoke empathy from the students and prompt them to help, utilizing their unique skills and perspectives.
Students' knowledge and skills will be enhanced through a series of training workshops and learning activities of various topics related to TEDY:
1. User experience and inclusive design
2. Rehabilitation engineering
3. Physical computing (embedded electronics), including wearables and soft circuits
4. Digital fabrication (3D printing, laser cutting and CNC),
5. Coding for interactivity and immersive visualization.
and much more.
Training sessions will be conducted as hands-on workshops or integrated with related courses offered by involved faculty members. These interdisciplinary skills will help students expand their knowledge and explore new possibilities. These opportunities may inspire novel ideas and designs of creative assistive devices, and may positively impact the future career development of students.
Target beneficiaries will receive free and functional assistive devices that may provide long-term solutions to their problems. In fact, the elderly and people with disabilities are not just “need-knowers”: they can play an active role in designing and inventing the devices, which can improve their self-esteem and evoke optimism.
We invite students who are interested in developing socially innovative ideas and assist them to create devices that truly meet the needs of the target beneficiaries. We also invite non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working for the elderly and disabled community to work with us for talks, field visits and workshops, to facilitate communication between students and the elderly and people with disabilities.
Makeathon (Makers’ Marathon) was organised at CityU in Fall 2017. Within 3 days, participating students, target beneficiaries (need-knowers), professionals and makers gathered and collaborated to invent innovative devices that can be tested and refined by users and inventors. The results were exciting. It was an enjoyable and meaningful experience for all participants. Functional prototypes were made by the end of the event.
An annual exhibition was held in January 2018 to showcase the fruitful results of our programme to the general public. We took this opportunity to collect feedback, which will be used to improve and refine the assistive devices. Through exhibits and guided tours, visitors can learn more about the difficulties that people with disabilities may encounter in daily life.
Come join us!