MORE | Spring 2021

Designing Personalized Assistive Technology for Student with Cerebral Palsy

Health icon, disabled. A red heart with a cardiac rhythm running through it.

One of the symptoms of Cerebral Palsy (CP) is the lack of spatial awareness due to the inability to respond well to visual cues. This project seeks to augment visual perception with an auditory feedback system to enhance spatial navigation of a student with CP. When using a wheelchair, the student tends to bump into obstacles and as such, requires assistance to get by. The project applies principles from medical instrumentation and leverages on the student’s ability to respond to sound to design an Arduino-ultrasonic-based auditory feedback device that alerts the student when approaching obstacles.

Student researcher

Gilgal Ansah

Biomedical engineering

Hometown: Accra, Greater Accra, Ghana

Graduation date: Spring 2021