Three Johns Hopkins engineering undergraduates, two of
them starters on the women's basketball team, have designed
and built a system that uses sound emitters in the ball and
on the backboard to enable blind people to play
basketball.
"There are people all over the country who are waiting
for something like this," said Mike Bullis, business
services development manager for the project's sponsor,
Blind Industries and Services of Maryland, a group that
aids the visually impaired. "There are blind athletes who
want an audible ball. And there are school-age children who
can benefit from the hand coordination that comes from
playing ball. Right now, blind kids can play with a ball,
but only if someone is there to find it if it rolls
away."
During a recent demonstration, Bullis, who is blind,
was able to catch passes with the adapted ball and sink
baskets on two of his three shots.
The students who devised the system were enrolled in a
two-semester engineering design course in the Whiting
School's Department of
Mechanical Engineering. The project was particularly
meaningful for two of the inventors, Alissa Burkholder and
Ashanna Randall. While completing their rigorous
engineering studies, the two also played for four years on
the Johns Hopkins women's basketball team, a perennial
Centennial Conference and NCAA Division III contender.
During their senior year, Burkholder, a shooting guard, and
Randall, an all-conference small forward, were major
contributors to the team's third straight season of 20-plus
wins.
Last fall, when they and other students in the design
course were asked to rank the project they'd most want to
be involved in, Burkholder and Randall, not surprisingly,
chose the audible basketball system. "I really liked that
it involved basketball and that it was something to help
the disabled community," said Burkholder, an engineering
mechanics major. She was assigned to the audible basketball
design team with fellow seniors Randall and Steve Garber,
both mechanical engineering majors.
In their completed system, a large piezoelectric sound
emitter powered by a 9-volt battery and mounted behind the
backboard sends out low pulse tones to help players locate
their shooting target. A remote control is used to turn it
on and off. A smaller sound emitter, embedded in the
basketball and powered by five 3-volt button batteries,
sends out a higher continuous tone to tell players where
the ball is.
Bullis cautioned that this prototype is not yet
perfect, noting that the basketball's sound pitch needs to
be lowered for the comfort of players and to avoid echo
problems, which would sometimes make it difficult for a
blind player to identify the ball's location. He plans to
consult a sports equipment maker about modifying the pitch.
He also hopes to persuade a company to install the system
in other sports items, including soccer balls and
volleyballs. "The process is ongoing," he said. "But I
think we'll end up with an audible ball that's going to be
a huge asset to the blind community."
When the student engineers designed the system, a key
hurdle was how to create a cavity in a ball to hold the
electronics while keeping it airtight. "We discovered that
it's really hard to put a device inside a ball in a way
that wouldn't change its characteristics," Randall said.
"Weight was a consideration. If the device was too heavy,
the ball wouldn't bounce or roll properly."
In their research, however, the students discovered
the Spalding Infusion basketball, which is equipped with an
airtight cylinder that houses a small pump. The company
provided several Infusion balls for the students to cut
open and study. Spalding then provided five additional
basketballs that had just the cylinder in them without the
pump. That gave the students a small space in which to
insert a sounding device and batteries. The opening's small
size limited their options and led to a relatively
high-pitched sounder. However, the students also came up
with an idea for an alternate mini-speaker system that
should emit a lower pitch. They provided details on this
alternative to the sponsoring organization, for possible
future developmental work.
"I don't think it's fully developed, but it's
definitely a great start," Randall said.
Burkholder added, "I've been playing basketball so
long, and it's something I really enjoy. It's nice to be
able to share that with people who wouldn't otherwise be
able to play."
With their Johns Hopkins studies completed, Garber and
Randall have lined up research-related jobs, and Burkholder
will enter a master's degree program in mechanical
engineering at Stanford University. The students said the
senior design project course was a valuable learning
experience.
"We learned how to interact with real-world
companies," Burkholder said. "We also learned how to work
with teammates and to compromise and to get different ideas
to mesh."
Added Garber, "I got a taste of what a real
engineering job will be like. We had a lot of deadlines to
meet and reports to write and revise. But it was cool to
get our hands on a real project."
The basketball system for the blind was one of nine
projects completed this year by undergraduates in the
engineering design course taught by Andrew F. Conn, a Johns
Hopkins graduate with more than 30 years of experience in
public and private research and development. Each team of
three or four students, working within budgets of up to
$10,000, had to design a device, purchase or fabricate the
parts and assemble the final product. Corporations,
government agencies and nonprofit groups provided the
assignments and funding. The course is traditionally a
well-received, hands-on engineering experience for Johns
Hopkins undergraduates.
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