KD Tech Days

making movement accessible, one glance at a time.

Project Intro

This year, at Hack The North 2023

💡 Inspiration

Did you know there are over 65 million people worldwide who are wheelchair users? Finding out this fact had astonished us, and upon doing more research, we had learned of the many daily struggles wheelchair users perservere through. Thus, our team had taken the initiative to create a project to provide ease to all people who use wheelchairs, especially those restricted by neck-down paralysis.

👀→🦼 What it does

motus. is a specialized wheelchair that is controlled by the users’ eye movement. Without a single word spoken, motus. does all the moving for you. Without having to constantly let people push you around, or manually move your wheels, which can often cause blisters, our device empowers its users.

🛠 How we built it

motus. was built through the mix of both Hardware and Software. With the team alternating between figuring our circuitry and wiring, to learning the advanced API of Adhawk glasses, a type of lens that analysizes eye movement, every hour was filled with excitement, learning, and challenges we overcame as a team.

🥲 Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we had ran into was figuring out the best way to power our wheelchair. Due to different hardware limitations and safety concerns, as well as maximizing our mobility and efficiency, we had tried out many different solutions until we landed on one that resulted in motus. being the best wheelchair for any potential wheelchair users.

🏆 Accomplishments that we’re proud of

As team, we are very proud of this project- especially how we were able to incorporate both hardware and software into our hack.

🤔 What we learned

This year, we had decided to include AdHawk glasses into our hack for our eye-tracking aspect of the wheelchair. This meant lots of learning of their API, software, and not to mention integrating that with our hardware circuitry, which lead to even more opportunities to grow our skill sets for the team!

🏢 What’s next for motus.

motus. has future of possibilities, from fine tuning even more precise directional control, to adding in special speed controls for users! We wanted to add a distance sensor to the front to prevent collisions, but we ran out of time. Additionally, another feature could be voice activated controls. Together, let’s make freedom of movement more accessible, one glance at a time.