Airport Transportation App

Students from the College of Engineering and School of Social Work are collaborating to design a new app—WheelTrip—that would allow older wheelchair-users to schedule someone to meet them at the airport curb with a wheelchair, escort them through the facility, and drop them off at their terminal. The hope is that, when complete, the app will work like the popular rideshare app Uber, with a traveler downloading it and scheduling a pickup at any of the nation’s airports.

In early March, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alerted the team that it is among three finalists (with Purdue University and the University of North Dakota) in the FAA Challenge: Smart Airport Student Competition, a national competition to encourage college students to use technology in designing solutions to airport travel issues.

“I’m proud of this team,” says Jay Rosenberger, a professor in the Industrial, Manufacturing, and Systems Engineering Department. “They’ve really embraced the idea of multidisciplinary collaboration, and they’ve been all-in on this competition since the beginning.”

Team members are engineering students Nikolai Drigalenko, Shannon Abolmaali, Isabella Reyna, Justine Batongmalaki, and Elio Salloum and social work student Joanna Glover.