PolyU's student project "RFIShoe" recently won the Silver Award of the 2014 Pan Pearl River Delta Universities Information Technology Project Competition. Supervised by Dr Henry Chan at the Department of Computing, students Liu Xi, Sun Ruo-qing and Zhu Jia-chen developed this device to facilitate people with upper limb disability in operating computers.

Each pair of RFIShoe has 16 sensors to detect a user's activities. Bluetooth technology is applied in transmitting detected data to the connected computer with a programme that can analyze the user's postures and mobility. This enables effective interpretation of the user's instructions. The RFID (Radio-frequency Identification) tag on the shoe allows the user to automatically log in or out the computer and open software.

Last year, the team won the Gold Award (Most Innovative EPC (Electronic Product Code)/RFID Application) of the Hong Kong U-21 RFID Awards 2013 with the same project.

Project details: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F3GSWXbkUk