A helping hand for wheelchair users

My name is Adith Thummalapalli. I serve as the vice president of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy's Adult Advisory Committee. I'm Colin Werth. I'm a 30-year-old language Dug Muscular dystrophy. I'm the president of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy's. Adult Advisory Committee. And we basically advise PPMD in a number of ways, in ways that the organization can help our community. And so, kind of what muscular dystrophy is, is people whose muscles deteriorate over time, so they kind of lose that muscle ability to, like, handle a lot of, like, heavy objects. And sometimes even walking, we have to use those wheelchairs to get place to place. And so I started in the fall talking with the students, kind of brainstorming what kind of devices would be good for us with our physical disabilities and limited arm function. So right now, there are two or three devices on the market right now that are similar sort of robotic arm type mechanisms type equipment that people using wheelchairs, like we do have access to. It's quite expensive, so we wanted to try to figure out maybe get a less expensive robotic arm. It's a very steep learning curve. Like, it takes a while to learn how to use it. But this new robotic arm that we worked to develop is a lot simpler and you can easily operate it with a simple joystick. (project chatter) The main functions of the robotic arm when it's attached to the motorized wheelchair is to be able to push an elevator button door or a handicapped button door so they can enter and leave buildings. And also kind of picking up a cup and bringing it to their face and then retrieving it back to that initial position. We kind of organized it buy off of who had the most experience. So for software, mechanical and electrical, people just kind of deviated towards what they did best. Software was definitely Cavan and Andrew. They led us in the software department, for sure. I've done a lot of work on the code. I think me and Andrew have been both doing a lot of code work. He's probably done a bit more than me. But yeah, we've been trying to make it so that it's as accurate as possible while also being intuitive to control. Coming into this spring semester, we were significantly behind on our coding and electronics in general. We didn't really have a well thought-out solution. We were working under a lot of assumptions, and so we spent Probably a solid, like six to 7 hours, each Monday, Wednesday, Friday, just trying to catch up. Yeah, so I started out using a Raspberry Pi. I knew a little bit of Python, not much, though. And then we switched to an Adafruit Feather, which uses a completely different language that I did not know at all. So I learned all of that from scratch. There's semi colons after every line that I just miss all the time. And I'm going through looking at all these errors and I'm like, I missed a semi colon. That's all it is. I was the one who was doing most of the cad. There are some bits and bobs here that other people designed, but mostly the cad of the case, electronics case, and the design of the aluminum plates. Those were mostly me. I worked on designing the circuitry. It was a saving function. So we have five buttons, The button itself needs to both execute an action and save using the same button. So I was working on how to use the timing feature. So holding the button for more than, for example, 3 seconds initiates a saving function. And kind of with code, I was working with the logic behind it. I mean, I was a part of a group organization before, kind of like a club in robotics, but to actually use robotics for a better, like, use case, like, to actually directly help people. It's been it's been very cool. But, yeah, it's gone from the vague idea of having a robotic arm on a wheelchair to this to a modular system that can perform certain functions, including pushing buttons picking up water being easy to control. The best moment had to be visiting one of our one of the PPMD members and just test fitting the entire assembly onto onto their Grenoble wheelchair. We received some great feedback, some feedback to improve the current design. When we went to go see Colin from PPMD, it was sort of a realization that we actually did achieve a lot of our goals for the projects, and he was messing with our joystick, messing with the robots, playing around with it, which is really neat to see. You know, the students, the Virginia Tech students, they have a very keen desire to help people. And, you know, through many discussions with them, you know, they're getting into mechanical engineering because they want to help people. They want to design devices. They want to design things that benefit people's lives. I think them just being able to work with directly with clients sets them up for success. And it looks like they had a really good time, you know, doing this project. To be able to you know, facilitate that with them, work with them has been a real pleasure.