How Microsoft Is Helping Blind Children Learn To Code And Gamifying Disease Treatment

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There are 253 million people living with a visual disability and 70,000 people with cystic fibrosis. Many are children, and Microsoft wants to help them.

Children are born with a natural curiosity and hunger to explore, learn and experience the world around them. For them, the world is full of mystery and wonder to which they wish to apply their senses, energy and vitality to understand. Their perception of the future is a vast and infinite realm of possibilities unaffected by the pressures of mortality that will later impose humble boundaries that limit their now unlimited horizons.

Sadly, children who live with visual impairments face a reality where their exploration of the world is without the benefit of sight. And children with Cystic Fibrosis, a chronic genetic disease that imposes an average life expectancy of 41, face their daily mortality while enduring daily treatments to prolong their lives.

The Microsoft Fizzyo Project helps children with Cystic Fibrosis participate in their daily treatments, and their Torino Project teaches coding to children who can not see.

Living with Cystic Fibrosis

Cystic fibrosis is a chronic disease in which an excess of sticky mucus builds up in the organs of an affected person's body. The lungs are usually the most affected. Untreated conditions such as infections or pneumonia can develop. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic condition that has no cure. It is also degenerative, and the patient's condition will only get worse over time.

A child with the disease can withstand preventive treatments, such as wearing a special vest to loosen the mucus in their lungs. A series of breathing exercises will also be submitted to physiotherapy (physio) several times a day. Although the effects of this therapy are not immediately visible, it is necessary to help prolong the life of patients.

Vicky Coxhead is a mother with two children, Aiden and Morgan, who have cystic fibrosis. She knows very well the challenges of getting her children to adhere to her daily regimen of life-saving treatments. As there are no immediate visible effects, the children saw little value in enduring the treatments that consume a lot of time. Coxhead contacted Microsoft's Haiyan Zhang for help.

Zhang appeared on the program The Big Life Fix (where inventors build solutions that change the lives of people in desperate need) and also invented the Emma Watch that helped a person living with Parkinson's disease overcome the tremors that They prevented writing their own name.

Project Fizzyo

Zhangs's help was requested, not to find a cure for Cystic Fibrosis, but to help devise a means to encourage Aiden and Morgan to undergo physiotherapy. To that end, he initially created a small electronic device that is attached to the end of the physiotherapy tool. The device detected the outgoing breath of the children and provided a visual response on a chart. The immediate visual response was a success among the boys.
Coxhead had the vision to marry the treatment with something the children loved: video games. Zhang had the help of a team that was committed to creating a range of video games to accompany the "improved" physio treatments. After a weekend hackathon event, a refined physio treatment tool was produced. The Fizzyo Project was born.
Like the Emma Project that followed the creation of Emma Watch, and Microsoft's search to help people with ALS who followed a hackathon project to help Steve Gleason, Project Fizzyo is a broader mission than the specific cause who started it The Fizzyo project seeks to improve the adherence of patients to treatments, connect patients and doctors, establish a treatment monitoring system and correlate this information with other health factors. The project will also study how effective physiology is over time and how it affects the patient's health. Prior to the Fizzyo Project, the collection and analysis of this type of data had never occurred.

Project Torino helps blind kids code

 
Microsoft's inclusion mission covers children with visual impairments. Project Torino is a method to teach children of different abilities (including those with visual impairments, autism or dyslexia) to code. The goal is to put these children on the road to become computer scientists or software engineers.
The Torino Project is aimed at children from seven to 11 years old and is currently limited to the United Kingdom. Microsoft has spent more than a year testing the system with approximately 12 children. The system uses coding tools that are large groups of various colors. Students use them to program things like songs, poetry and sounds. Torino teaches students the fundamental concepts of programming that can be applied to careers that involve programming.
Torino is integral since it includes a teaching component that does not require an educator to be competent in coding. Finally, Microsoft created an application that converts physical programs that children create into text-based code.
Microsoft's investment in helping children is admirable. Through the Fizzyo Project, the company helps children participate in treatments that save lives, and Project Torino teaches how to code a population that is often overlooked. No company is perfect, but just as criticism is leveled against corporations when we consider that bad decisions were made, investments that are worthwhile must be applauded.