Wheelchair with voice control
The invention of a schoolgirl made a splash in the scientific world
16-year-old Yaya Liu from Hobart, who came up with how technology can make life easier for people with special needs, just returned from the 5th Biomedical Engineering International Conference in Bangkok, where she presented the wheelchair. Moreover, usually either graduate students or university professors present their projects at this conference, but you will not meet schoolchildren here.
For the layout of her development, the schoolgirl used a regular Lego constructor. The wheelchair control mechanism responds to commands that are universal for any language. Orders to the robot are given using combinations of long or short sounds, such as "dit" or "yes". He distinguishes between eight commands that allow the wheelchair to move forward and backward, left and right, rise and fall, and stop.
Yaya Liu started working on the project in 2012. She was prompted to think about this by a story about paralyzed people living in Northern Tasmania. "I was thinking about a technology that would allow them to get maximum independence in everyday life," the schoolgirl shares. And she has developed as many as two wheelchair control systems. The first one, no matter how fantastic it may sound, was designed to be controlled by the movement of the ears, eyebrows and even the expansion of the nostrils. The second one was aimed at using universal commands. Yaya invented it for people who could not control the stroller with the help of facial muscles.
The beauty of voice control also lies in the fact that it is not based on voice recognition, Yaya notes, otherwise a lot of time, money and computer equipment would have to be ruined for the correct operation of this mechanism. The schoolgirl also managed to bypass the use of auxiliary parts. There is no need to attach any special devices such as magnets to the language of the person uttering the commands, there is no need to use eye scanning. Yaya wanted her invention to be as convenient as possible for people.
The girl's mother Yin Liu, who teaches computer science at the University of Tasmania, gives up before the genius of her daughter. "It's really incredible and amazing. I am insanely glad that she is such a smart girl. Yaya has put a lot of effort into this development." The mentor of the schoolgirl, her neighbor and doctor of sciences in the field of artificial intelligence Graham Faulkner noted that the achievements of Yai are "simply amazing", besides, she became the first schoolgirl to present her invention at a conference of this level.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru23.01.2013