Students Create Unseen Business Innovations

Never before had a semester project presentation turned into a live cooking demo. But on 28 May, Michel Abela - a second-year master's student in robotics - prepared crepes while wearing a blindfold, under the watchful eye of the audience and the three other members of his group: Ghita Amrani, Chloé Abou Halka and Alessandro Minghelli. What impressed the ATC selection panel wasn't Abela's culinary prowess, but rather the functional feasibility of the group's prototype. Their device, which looks like a first-generation cell phone but without the antenna, serves as a remote control that the visually impaired can use to operate a touch-control cooktop.

The group's project is one of six that competed in the 2026 ATC, where cross-disciplinary teams of students worked closely with disabled individuals to design assistive technology. Abela and his peers collaborated with EPFL employee Hervé Hirt and his wife, both of whom are visually impaired. The couple told the team that preparing meals had become difficult since most kitchen appliances today are equipped with smooth touch panels rather than pushbutton controls.

The four students spent a fair amount of time with Hirt and his wife at their home in order to understand the challenges they face on a daily basis. That's how the students came up with the idea of designing a remote-control handset for operating a cooktop, with raised buttons arranged in a matrix. The handset they designed uses radio frequency - and not Bluetooth or WiFi, to avoid potential interference - to communicate with a small computer integrated in the cooktop. The system is water-resistant and suitable for use in a kitchen environment. It also includes a small speaker tilted towards the users that, along with giving the system a retro-telephone feel, projects voice instructions to guide them as they cook. For instance, they can press an "Info" button to get the status of all four burners. What's more, the students programmed the system to operate in four languages - perfect for Switzerland's multilingual market.

A step ahead

So far, businesses have taken little interest in consumers with special needs, and few have developed household appliances that run on voice command. "Products are generally designed to appeal to as many people as possible," says Amrani, a first-year master's student in electrical engineering. What she finds particularly interesting about this project is that it's focused on the needs of real people. "I was motivated by the opportunity to be a part of something with so much meaning," she says.

For Abou Halka, a first-year master's student in life sciences engineering with a minor in Neuro-X, the cross-disciplinary nature of the project was a major plus. "I acquired a number of tools that will be useful to me later in my career, when I'm working as a biomedical engineer - such as for developing implants."

For their part, Abela and Minghelli have both completed four semesters of their master's programs in robotics, and ATC was a natural next step. Minghelli enjoyed pulling together the broad range of skill sets needed for the project. He contributed to the design of the device and helped to build the prototype at SPOT, EPFL's makerspace on the Lausanne campus.

Abela appreciated the hands-on engineering in particular. "I've been crafting robots since I was little - and I love a challenge. It was stimulating to work directly with Hervé. He gave us nearly instant feedback on our system. Both he and his wife Béatrice were really understanding, including when something they asked for simply couldn't be done."

The four students spent between 20 and 30 hours a week developing their system over the 14 weeks of the project. Things got especially tense at the end, with a few all-nighters and last-minute worries about an electronic component that took forever to arrive.

Hirt believes it was a great experience: "Hats off to the team - they developed an amazing product in a short amount of time. Engineering schools often work with the disabled on these kinds of projects, but that effort almost never results in a finished device."

He hopes that the students' system will eventually make it to market. Apparently it's a prospect that has crossed their minds too, given the knowing looks shared all around when the issue was raised. But any future business plans are being kept carefully under wraps.