When they are finished with their design, the team, which includes a Social Work recent graduate, hopes the app would work like the popular rideshare app Uber: A traveler would download the app and schedule a pickup at any of the nation’s airports.
Joanna Glover, a graduate research assistant in the School of Social Work and a member of the team, said her 69-year-old grandmother came to mind when she joined a team of student engineers who were designing the app.
If Glover could make air travel experiences less stressful for her grandmother, she says, then her teamwork would have been worth the investment.
“I would really hope it’s something she could use it. That’s my hope,” Glover says of her grandmother. “That would really give me a sense of pride if my grandmother could use it.”
The team is designing the app as a part of the Federal Aviation Administration’s “FAA Challenge: Smart Airport Student Competition.” The FAA sponsors the national competition to encourage college students to use technology in designing solutions to airport travel issues.
In February, the Federal Aviation Administration alerted the UTA group that they are among three university teams who are finalists in the Smart Airport Student Competition. Two other teams, one from Purdue University and the other from the University of North Dakota, round out the top three finalist teams, the agency said in a release.
The top team in the competition will win $25,000.
Each of the three teams will present their technology proposals to FAA officials during a meeting scheduled for Nov. 29 – Dec. 2, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The presentations originally were scheduled for May 11-14 in Atlantic City, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced FAA officials to reschedule the event.
Glover, who graduated last spring said, despite no longer being in school, she still would attend the presentation with her teammates. The delay in presenting the team’s project is a blessing in disguise, Glover said.
“This has benefited us since it gives us more time to possibly allow potential users to try our app,” Glover said. “We still have high hopes that we will do well and are excited to continue to improve our app throughout the summer.”
The students named the app the WheelTrip. It is being designed by a team of six students in the College of Engineering, including a civil engineering and an industrial engineering major, a doctoral student and Glover, who earned a Master’s in Social Work with a focus on aging concerns in May. The remaining two team members are undergraduate engineering students.
Glover’s role on the team is unique: Initially, her engineering peers proposed to design a driverless wheelchair that would whisk riders from the airport curb, through security and to their gates – all with no assistance.
Glover saw things differently. It’s unlikely, she shared with her team, that an aging adult would embrace an autonomous wheelchair for many reasons. In fact, Glover feared they might reject it altogether.
“That was going to be a problem,” Glover told her team. “I was a little speechless. I was like ‘We’re going to build a wheelchair that drives itself?’ I thought ‘My grandmother would get really anxious’.”
Glover encouraged her teammates to instead design an app that would allow aging travelers to schedule a specific time for curbside wheelchair pickup. Once the traveler arrives at the airport, the wheelchair – and personal assistant – would be there waiting.
“That part is almost like an Uber or a Lyft,” she said of the team’s design. “You can request it really quickly and you will know when it will be there.”
“I was asking my grandmother ‘Would you use this?’ Glover said of the newer app proposal. “She said, ‘Absolutely, I would use this’.”
As Glover suspected, her grandmother’s concern was of riding in a driverless wheelchair through a busy airport terminal. “She said ‘Well, that is interesting, but I like the app better.’ I said ‘Well, okay, I’ll take that back to the team’.”
She did just that.