A Calgary school is one of only a dozen from across the country to make it to the semi-finals of Samsung’s “Solve for Tomorrow” contest.
There are six students on the team from STEM Innovation Academy High School in northwest Calgary, all of whom have backgrounds in robotics.
For their entry, members decided to engineer an electric wheelchair controlled by facial movements.
“We found out about it just a day before the deadline,” said Grade 10 student Joel Amaldas, 15.
“I used a muse headband to control a robotic hand for one of my programing final projects, so we used that where a person could control a wheelchair just using their mind, so for quadriplegics or people that couldn’t move any of their limbs at all.”
Amaldas says the muse headset fits over the forehead and is typically used for meditation purposes.
“We were able to reverse engineer it and find out a way to take the data ourselves in order to use it to track our actions,” he said. “Whenever you raise your eyebrows, it would detect it and then send a signal to the robot for it to go to the place that you’re currently looking at.”
Jason Deeprose, 18, added a Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headset to the equation to integrate eye tracking of the person using the wheelchair.
“What I did basically allows users to look at a point on the floor and then tell the wheelchair to drive there,” he said. “This headset is usually used in industrial applications for maintaining buildings, but truthfully, I don’t understand why can’t be used in the everyday lives of people in need.”
Laura Roa, a teacher at STEM Innovation Academy High School, serves as a mentor for the robotics team.
She says this is the first time the school has participated in the competition.
“It’s been so wonderful watching that collaboration from Grade 10 to Grade 12 and seeing how their different passions can be merged to solve and help in the community. We’re pretty proud of the students.”
“We are actually the only school in Alberta that is a regional finalist.”
Team member Roxane Meng, 16, was initially tasked with researching motorized wheelchairs.
“There’s not a lot of solutions practically for paraplegics and those with locked-in syndrome,” she said. “It seems like it all has to be pretty physical, and what we’ve made is like something that utilizes your cognitive brainwaves and it’s also more ergonomic.”
Dhaya Srinivasan, 18, is focused on the electrical and mechanical side of the project, and says there’s a benefit to using existing robot technology for the application.
“Normal wheelchairs, they can only move in two axes, they can move forward and back, and they can also rotate,” he said.
“Our wheelchair, what it can do is it can move forward, backward and it can also translate right and left, and it can also rotate, so that’s what makes it so much more maneuverable.”
Samsung has hosted the competition for more than a decade.
“Innovation is really in the DNA of Samsung,” said Tafari Jilany, Samsung senior director of corporate marketing.
“We see it every day across the multitude of products and services that we launch, but it’s not for the sake of just innovation for something new and cool, it’s really designed to make a positive impact on Canadians and connect them and really make their lives easier – and the ‘Solve for Tomorrow’ challenge is an extension of that.”
Winners will be announced sometime around April 30.
