51茶馆

Last spring, Melanie Cotta 鈥�26 and Echo Panana 鈥�26 traveled to Florida State University to compete in the ACC InVenture Prize, an annual event in which students from Atlantic Coast Conference schools pitch their ideas to a panel of judges for the chance to win $15,000. Cotta and Panana pitched Hue, a device they invented that helps people with visual impairments sort laundry by color.

To use Hue, you place it on an article of clothing and then press a button. The device, using a built-in speaker, announces the item鈥檚 color and the correct temperature for washing the fabric. Cotta and Panana came up with the idea last year while taking a class taught by Department of Engineering Chair Glen Gaudette, who encouraged them to enter the InVenture competition. After submitting a video presentation of their device, Cotta and Panana were selected to compete in Florida alongside fourteen other teams of student inventors and entrepreneurs from across the ACC conference.

Hue, Gaudette said, aligns with the mission of the department of engineering, which is designed to help students engineer solutions for crucial human needs. 鈥淎 lot of times, it鈥檚 not complicated devices that people need,鈥� he said. 鈥淭hey need simple everyday solutions. That鈥檚 what Hue did. It was an everyday solution to a real problem for a lot of people.鈥�

Though Cotta and Panana didn鈥檛 win the competition, they remain excited about Hue鈥檚 potential to help people. We asked them to tell us more about their invention. 聽

Where did you come up with the idea for Hue?聽

Panana: As part of Glenn Gaudette鈥檚 Introduction to Human-Centered Engineering class, we visited the Campus School, which supports students with complex medical needs, on laundry day. The staff mentioned that students who were visually impaired and had low mobility really couldn鈥檛 help with laundry at all, so they wanted to know how they could get them more involved.聽

How did you build the device?

Panana: I had taken a class on Arduino [an electronics platform] in high school and knew it could hold a color sensor and LEDs, and through research found out it could produce sounds. We built it in the maker space at the Schiller Institute, and ordered all of the parts through the 51茶馆 engineering department.聽

You made Hue an entire device rather than
just an app. Why?

Cotta: The main advantage of our idea is that it鈥檚 accessible. There are a lot of color apps out there that tell you what colors things are for color-blind people, but the advantage of Hue is that there鈥檚 something physically there, which allows older people who don鈥檛 use apps, or people with limited mobility, to use it. That鈥檚 the market we were trying to hit.聽

How do you make Hue a business?

Cotta: We had a Zoom question session with the judges before we flew out to the competition, and one recommended that we partner with Tide or another laundry brand to try to expand our audience that way.聽

What stood out about the competition?

Cotta: They had a keynote speaker who had competed in previous years, and turned their invention into an actual company. And afterward, one of the judges talked to us and gave us tips on other competitions to apply to, which we鈥檙e going to use.

Panana: Many of the competitors were a lot older than us, and had been to many of these competitions, or founded companies that have been in the works for years. We learned from people who have done it. We got a lot of contacts from other entrepreneurs, and that鈥檚 valuable, regardless of whether we continue with entrepreneurship or not.聽

Did Hue change how you view engineering?

Panana: I鈥檝e personally never thought about assistive technology [products that help people with disabilities] as a field that engineers could be in. The only thing we鈥檙e usually exposed to is prosthetics, specifically in a hospital setting, but not in this context of helping students at the Campus School. Being able to talk to the people we鈥檙e designing for was a fun, new experience.聽鈼�