Healing Spoon WTH 2024

We innovate for a socially-inclusive future: a fully scalable, efficient and reliable food and supply distribution service. Our aim is to care for our elderly, living alone in Singapore.

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Inspiration

Some of us, after our volunteering experience previously, thought about how the seasonal nature of volunteer work could lead to gaps in charity food-and-supply distribution networks. We were hence inspired to innovate and come with a solution ourselves.

What it does

Our solution, Healing Spoon, is a robot on wheels that will be loaded with food and supplies for each registered elderly household at the start of each day. We will obtain these food and supplies from partnering with charity organisations and from donations by the public. Healing Spoon will then securely transport the food to the households at their preferred timeslots. We also created an accompanying app that can be used by volunteers or for those that are more tech-savvy that can be used to call for customer service or to change their food, supply and timeslot requests. For ease of use, we have also simplified these into a unit consisting of a few buttons to streamline and simplify the overall process for the general elderly.

How we built it

We built a simplified prototype consisting of wood for the body of Healing Spoon, while the electrical components consist of ESP32's that communicate wirelessly with one another to coordinate the movements of the robot. We also used LED screens to display the meal, speakers and microphones for calling with customer support in case any issues arise, and also infrared sensors for pathfinding. We also plan to use RFID to make sure only verified users get their allocated meals.

Challenges we ran into

Our lack of experience with circuitry made it hard for us to implement our ideas with the ESP32's and the different components.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to create a product that aligns with our greater vision of a robot that can help address the very real shortcomings of many charity distribution networks in Singapore.

What we learned

To create a solution from the ground up is not easy. We understood the importance of collaboration, not just with one another, but also with others with more Hackathon experience, giving us critical advice that helped us overcome mental blocks and material dilemmas.

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