OWL

Inspiration

When we heard about the Age and Place challenge, an idea struck us right away, and we decided that we wanted to make a product that would assist the eldery, especially the disabled, and prevent any harm from coming upon them in their daily lives. My grandmother is not able hear very well, and lost her sight very early on. Though it inspires me to see that she is able to go out and do things that average people are able to do, it does make me a little sad that she is unable to do some things that people take for granted, and does not like to take risks to do simple tasks such as walk through a room. I think that our project, OWL, will help people like my grandmother in having the ability to do more tasks in their daily lives.

What it does

OWL was created to assist the eldery and people who have disabilites that prevent them from doing simple things in their daily lives, so our project is trying to change this by adding extra safety procautions for people without limiting their privacy and mobility. it does this through a variety of sensors that detect many things such as motion and distance from other objects, which will prevent the person who is using the product to be and feel as though they are safe and do things more freely in their lives. If we were to expand OWL, we would make it so that it would have the ability to communicate with other devices and gather data, so that as time passes, the program could continuously improve itself.

How we built it

We primarly utilised the Lego Mindstorms program and used the brain of the robot kit as the center of our project. Today, we focused on figuring out the ultrasonic sensor by playing around with the options on the computer program for Mindstorms. Later on, we built the 'owl' structure upon our model, and created it so that it could be properly secured to the human body.

Challenges we ran into

As a group, none of us were all too experienced with Mindstorms, other than two of us who used it in elementary school. This proved a problem, as we based our entire model off of the assumption that we would be able to quickly figure out how to manipulate to the program to incorporate the ultasonic sensor, but this was not the case, and we ended up having quite a lot of issues with getting the program to work without incessantly having beeping noises (sorry for interrupting your presentations, Hack Mom). However, with the help of engineering student MacKenzie, we eventually figured it out, and could move on.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Towards the middle of the hackathon, I was particularly proud of our ideas as we came up with them, but I think that we as a group especially felt accomplished when we were able to get our program to work in a way that was actually kind of efficient, even though that was mainly due to the help of MacKenzie.

What we learned

The one thing that really stood out to me throughout the event was the merging of different ideas. Many experienced programmers and sponsor peoples migrated around the room during the entirety of the event, and though we had to explain our idea at least ten times, I found the experience extremely helpful and rewarding. So many people brought different, but very helpful, ideas to the table, and it is a fact to say that each opinion helped shape our idea and project in a positive way. Usually, I don't really appreciate it when people come up and approach me to talk without my asking first, but I realize now that that is a positive thing because it helps me get out of my comfort zone, and also learn many new things that I would have never learned before.

What's next for OWL

Though we have only successfully programmed one aspect of owl so far, there are many different sensors that we have yet to incorporate. Also, as mentioned before, OWL will expand into a network and be able to innovate it by itself as time passes. Also, the precision of OWL will also be improved, since it is somewhat unreliable in terms of positions of different objects.

Built With

• mindstorm