Engineering students design adaptive swim goggles for community member with brain injury

We're here testing out smart swimming goggles with Stephen Nape. Our goal was to create a multi-component system where we're able to have Stephen get back in the water, which fulfill his passion of swimming independently without the need of someone reminding him when he's approaching the wall or when he's getting closer to the end of the pool. It's important to swim again because it really is the main athletic and social hobby that I had prior to my brain injury and after brain injuries you find that your world really collapses, you don't have much social interaction, and it's really hard to relate with people. But being in the pool gives me a place where I can be around people. It's easy for me, it's easy on my body, good exercise, and I just happen to love it. We spent a lot of time with him telling us about how he sees the world, everything he experiences, and his ideas, and then from there we did a lot concept generation. We found something called low-red technology which is a low power long range and it's a microcontroller that can actually communicate under the water so we were able to work on that so that we can have our boxes and our goggles all talking to each other. We have blackout goggles to make sure that no light gets inside Steven's vision as he's swimming underwater and attached to the goggles we have an electrical feather component which is communicating with the two ultrasonic sensors. They start to sense you coming closer, and then they talk to the actual earpiece, which tells you to stop. This group specifically, just rally around a problem I have. It means the world, because they can potentially help me get back in the pool, but it also means they're thinking long-term on a project that could benefit so many other people in the swimming community with or without brain injuries, but with vision issues.