New mobile applications developed by U of T Electrical Engineering students could change the way we treat addiction, teach kindergartners and even how we experience a night at the theatre.

Students from Professor Parham Aarabi’s Mobile Applications Lab and Professor Jonathan Rose’s interdisciplinary app design class demonstrated nine new Android and iPhone apps at a showcase on Thursday, April 25. About 100 people came to see the demos and try the apps out for themselves.

The apps included Snap’n’Dose, that helps parents figure out how much medicine to give their children, MindfulME, which helps people recovering from addiction disorders, and LunchTIME, which helps children learn to tell time on analogue clocks.

Other apps demonstrated at the showcase included an iPhone ‘heart tricorder’ that can record your heart rate using a photo of your fingertip, forehead, and recording your heartbeat with the phone’s microphone, a personalized service to record and control strenuous activity for patients with congenital heart conditions, an app that turns any surface into a touch-sensitive device, augmented reality for theatregoers and an object tracking system for phone cameras.