Inspiration
Kabeer and I (Simran!) care deeply about impact, and building cool sh*t.
He has a background in IoT and my background is in computational bio/health technologies. When thinking about what we want to create during HTN, we decided it would be most fun to find an intersection between hardware and healthcare.
We perceive up to 80% of all impressions by means of our sight, but there are 43 million people living with blindness and 295 million people living with moderate-to-severe visual impairment. O ur team wanted to build a product that could assist blind people in navigating their world with the most ease possible. Building a tool that could scan and alert the person of their surroundings was most important to us. Thus project ABEL began.
What it does
When there is an object within 50 cm of the cane, the buzzer buzzes, alerting the user of obstacles in the way of their movement.
How we built it
We connected the arduino to ultrasonic sensors which measure the distance to an object by measuring the time between the emission and reception. Once the arduino and ultrasonic sensors were connected, we coded it so that if the distance in cm is < 50cm, a buzzer would ring, alerting the person that there is a object nearby.
Challenges we ran into
Time was the biggest time constraint that we had this entire weekend. The matter of a couple hours could've changed our entire next steps only if we had access to the right hardware (wifi modules!) and time to practice and run our software.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of ourselves for learning to use Arduino and hardware involved with it, in a short amount of time. We tought ourselves to run the IDE and worked through many small examples before we dove into our main idea.
What we learned
Kabeer has worked with hardware, IoT and software for a couple projects in the past, but the entire hackathon this weekend was an incredible learning experience for the both of us. From using arduinos, breadboards, learning to use the mini arduino with wifi (the particle photon), hard coding our solution to failing multiple times and getting to know more on how wiring works between breadboards, this entire weekend was an amzing learning experience and we are both glad to spend time together and work on something that we were both interested in, but also was the middle of our interests
What's next for ABEL
As we brainstormed multiple ideas days before the actual hackathon, our final idea was to take two that make sense and put them together; so in this case, it would be fall detection linked directly to an SMS/email integration to let an emergency contact of the victim know that they have fallen.
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