WheelChair Wizard

Inspiration

The Wheelchair Rescue Wizard project was inspired by a real-life incident involving a close friend, an ex-dancer whose life was dramatically altered by a car accident. After becoming reliant on a wheelchair for mobility, she experienced a distressing incident where she was stranded for weeks waiting for a simple wheelchair repair. This incident highlighted a significant gap in services and accessibility for wheelchair users. Driven by her experiences and the shared stories of many others, we were galvanized into action. The Wheelchair Rescue Wizard was born out of the necessity to empower wheelchair users, providing them with timely, localized, and practical solutions to wheelchair-related problems.

What it does

The Wheelchair Rescue Wizard empowers wheelchair users by offering an AI-enabled platform that can provide assistance with diagnosing problems, finding nearby repair shops, suggesting helpful YouTube videos, and more. The tool understands and responds to user prompts, and as such, can handle a variety of requests. The AI's ability to learn from past interactions means that it gets more efficient and effective over time, making it an ever-improving resource for wheelchair users.

How we built it

The development of the Wheelchair Rescue Wizard involved harnessing OpenAI's GPT-3 model and refining it to understand user queries and produce relevant responses. The heart of the project, however, lies in the incorporation of co-sine similarity. This technique, fundamental in Natural Language Processing, calculates semantic similarity between words. By leveraging this, we could extract valuable semantic data from user inputs, public wheelchair manuals, community discussions, and YouTube videos. Interweaving Google Maps and YouTube APIs, the platform was enabled to locate nearby repair shops and suggest helpful repair videos.

Challenges we ran into

The journey towards creating an inclusive platform was not without its hurdles. From integrating APIs to ensuring an accessible and intuitive user interface, to guaranteeing the accuracy and relevance of AI responses, we faced distinct challenges at every step. These were overcome through rigorous testing, iterative improvements, and an unwavering dedication to the project's core mission - to enhance accessibility and empower wheelchair users.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment is the Wheelchair Rescue Wizard itself. Despite the challenges, we managed to develop an interactive platform that not only identifies problems but provides timely solutions. It's a tool that goes beyond answering queries - it empowers, providing wheelchair users with greater autonomy in managing their mobility devices.

What we learned

The process of developing the Wheelchair Rescue Wizard reaffirmed the idea that the power of algorithms is realized when they are tailored to create solutions rooted in empathy and practicality. While technology is the tool, the core of any solution should always be human-centric.

What's next for WheelChair Wizard

As we look towards the future, we plan to incorporate additional features like audio input and output, scrape additional wheelchair assembly literature, and use advanced AI models to enhance our accuracy. Our goal is to continuously refine and expand the Wheelchair Rescue Wizard, making it an even more intuitive, helpful, and comprehensive resource for wheelchair users.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• llms
• openai
• pinecone
• python
• streamlit