Purpose
The Assistive Eating Device allows a user to eat food without the use of their extremities. The AED has the ability to drastically increase the standard of care for those who are unable to afford personal care aides or whom must depend on working family members.
Overview
Our device features a custom robot gripper with automatically hot-swapping utensils that can cut, scoop, or pick up food. The magnetic hot-swap module--designed with adaptability in mind--can easily be repurposed to use a drinking glass, toothbrush, or any other item necessary for daily life. Similarly, our VLA model approach allows the AED to be taught new skills as the needs of its user change over time. This grants the AED the rare distinction of an assistive technology whose value can actually appreciate over time. The purpose of the ESP32-S3 is to turn presence of the hot swaps into signals for the caretaker UI and remote monitoring dashboard.
Technical Details
Our VLA model handles arm movement and feeding decisions based on eye tracking input from the host PC.
The ESP32-S3 serves as a dedicated embedded UI and telemetry module. It detects which utensil is currently in use via three micro switch contacts using a process of elimination approach — whichever slot is empty indicates the active utensil. State is displayed on a 0.96" SSD1306 OLED and broadcast over Bluetooth Low Energy to a caretaker dashboard hosted at wwmgsh.tech. The dashboard shows active utensil, feeding status, session timer, and slot occupancy in real time, and allows the caretaker to pause, resume, or stop the feeding session remotely. Serial communication over USB passes arm state commands from the host PC to the ESP32, keeping the display in sync with the arm's actions.
What we've accomplished
- Functional hot-swap utensil detection
- Real time OLED display showing utensil in use, status, session time, and slot occupancy
- BLE telemetry broadcasting live state to any connected, compatible device
- Caretaker web dashboard at wwmgsh.tech with stop, pause, and resume controls
- Serial command parser receiving arm state updates from host PC
- Software emergency stop propagating through both display and serial to host PC
What we've learned
- ESP32-S3 GPIO pin behavior requires careful pin selection to avoid boot loops
- BLE notification subscriptions on iOS require explicit CCCD descriptor handling
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