Golden Path

Inspiration

We have a lot of people with disabilities in our friend group - one of our teammates, for example, is legally blind and has a lot of trouble interfacing with the world. Another one of our friends is wheelchair-bound, and is unable to navigate as freely as he might wish to. We looked to them and their problems to imagine solutions for some of their major pain points.

While significantly different, we actually drew inspiration from the ACMI as well, and their idea of the Lens. The concept of compressed information, available for self-service by the users on demand, drew our imaginations. It's a way to have minimally invasive infrastructure while still providing significant power to fuel our engineering ideas.

What it does

We actually have two adjacent solutions in similar veins. The first one is a solution targeted at blind people, or those with impaired vision. Supermarkets are a crucial part of our lifestyle - the ability to buy groceries is basically essential for our day to day life. However, buying groceries becomes far more of a chore for those who are unable to see and navigate as well. We wanted to create a way for them to navigate the minute, detailed stretches of space, in these critical locations. We decided to target another one of their senses, to provide them with the information they need to perform these tasks.

As such, we have an add-on to the price tags commonly found at supermarkets such as NTUC Fairprice, where we are able to add NFC tags onto them, and provide auditory information about products through their smartphones. With the relative inexpensiveness of NFC infrastructure, we aim to be able to catalogue each and every product in the supermarket, providing them with crucial information such as what they're browsing, the price, and the possibility of additional information such as allergens.

Secondly, with the same theme of navigation, we realise that finding our way around can be difficult at the best of times - look no further than unknown school campuses, with their winding hallways and concealed stairwells, or even critical locations such as hospitals. Now imagine if your mobility was impaired - finding your way around only to be confronted with an escalator you can't traverse is extremely frustrating.

As such, we designed a navigation system to be implemented within buildings, where GPS navigation like Google Maps is no longer able to assist you effectively. This marks major landmarks or locations with QR codes, and allows you to find your way to any other location with the additional guidance of images of the route. In order to help out those with disabilities, we built a toggle directly into the application, where it's able to suggest you an alternative path, more suitable for those with impaired movement, clear of the standard hazards such as narrow walk paths or escalators.

Furthermore, to address scalability concerns, these applications were all designed in pairs - one for the actual user, of course, but also one for the "manager", or 'administrator" as they might be, in order to create this infrastructure quickly. This extends to an application to program routes into the system, a way to manage the product catalogue and registry data at supermarkets quickly, and even programming NFCs seamlessly.

How we built it

We built this with RFID cards provided with SUTD, using an LCD display powered by an ESP32S3 to show information and housed in a 3D printed shell. and our own knowledge of web development, to create a series of web apps. These come in pairs - one for the end user to meet their accessibility neds, and one for the manager to easily create this infrastructure, whether it's rapidly programming NFCs or creating routes for customers.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was definitely time. Given more time, we have a whole plethora of ideas and quality of life changes that we want to implement - unfortunately, we only had the single day to brainstorm and create our prototype.

Another challenge we ran into was faulty equipment. The LCD display provided was faulty, and we spent a great deal of valuable time attempting to make it work without realising that it was already beyond salvage.

Furthermore, NFCs are still considered experimental technology. Creating the scripts to operate with them took a lot of time (and surveying the NFC standards overnight). We struggled to get our implementation as perfect as we wanted to, and ran into other adjacent problems such as the platform, device and their associated limitations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The biggest upside for this weekend is that our stuff works as expected! Perhaps not as well as it would as an actual implementation - there's a few things we would definitely change in the name of maintainability and clean code, as well as faster response times from non-free-tier hosting. But we were able to learn to work with new technology on the fly and create the solutions we wanted to under the time pressure. Not just NFCs, of course - 3d printing out the models and the housing unit mockup, working with audio and voice synthesis, as well as thinking of creative ways to pack information tightly while still meeting our needs.

What we learned

We gained a better understanding of not just experimental technology, but also a clearer idea of how people with disabilities navigate life and the world around us, as well as some hardware engineering basics to help us prototype more ideas in the future.

What's next for Golden Path

Well, we designed these systems with scalability in mind. With sufficient interest, it can easily be polished and deployed in supermarkets and buildings across all of Singapore in no time at all!