This wheelchair recognises your hand gestures

The special wheelchair for persons with severe disability, developed by students from Amrita College in Kollam, Kerala, was one of 29 prototypes on display at Intel India Embedded Challenge, a competition for students and professionals, here on Wednesday.
“We thought of this (wheelchair) as we observed persons with disability from abroad visiting Mata Amritanandamayi Mutt located opposite our campus,” said Daniel, a student of the College, who, along with Arun Kumar, Nived Krishnan and Arjun have worked with mentors from Intel to develop the wheelchair.

“Intel gave us the embedded chips and provided mentorship. We worked on this idea for the past seven months,” he said.

Though the wheelchair did not win the grand prize of Rs 10 lakh, another product for the disabled –– a cost-effective refreshable brailler system that can convert electronic text into readable braille –– developed by Satyajeet Shinde from Army Institute of Technology Pune, who got the second runners up prize of Rs 50,000.

The grand award, along with the opportunity to participate in India Innovation Pioneers Challenge being jointly held by Intel and Department of Science and Technology, went to Sanjay Bansal and team (TractRobot) from Delhi, developers of a substitute to human-controlled agriculture system that allows tractors to be used through remote control system and operated through video, GPS and other technologies.

The first runners up, Avinash Siravuru and team from Vellore Institute of Technology, won Rs one lakh for their speed detection system based on embedded chips that tracks those violating speed in traffic.

The 29 finalists have been shortlisted from 2170 initial entries that came from colleges and from working professionals who were given the challenge to make devices that use embedded systems.

“The use of computer is slowly shifting from the recognisable computing devices like PC to invisible embedded systems such as glucometers and numerous systems that sit in automobiles of today,” said Rahul Bedi, Director-Corporate Affairs, Intel South Asia.
“We thought it is important for students to have exposure in using embedded systems in different applications and came up with this competition. We began in August last year and are now concluding this year's event,” he said.
The grand winners, Bedi said, would be helped further by Intel to device a business model around their invention.
DH News Service