C.P. Ravikumar, Texas Instruments
In the first part of this blog post, we saw three projects in the area of Assistive Technologies, carried out by students of Indian engineering colleges. In this second part, we will see three more. You will find links to video demonstrations of these projects in this blog. You can see these projects being demonstrated live at TI India Educators' Conference 2014 on April 5, 2014. The first project, from IIT Roorkee, tries to help people on a health diet to measure the calorific value of a food item. The second project, from Jaypee Institute of Technology, attempts to build a low-cost exoskeleton that can help a paralysed person walk. The third project from College of Engineering, Pune, finds a way to help a blind person read.
Eat, Weigh, Love
How often have you wished that you could count your calories before you ate your food? Unfortunately, I am one of those who worries about calories after I consume them. I secretly think that worrying may spend some of those calories, but it does not always help. For many people, “Eat, Pray, Love” may mean “eat that food because you love it and pray later that it won’t tip your balance in the wrong direction.”
Two students from IIT Roorkee have brought me renewed hope. Yatin Tyagi Harshit Sihare, working with Prof.Anand Bulusu, have designed a system that can tell us the calorific value of an eatable.
“Our objective has been to develop a nutrition scale,” says Yatin. “If successfully commercialized, it can contribute to the reversal of the trend of rising obesity. It can be useful in hospitals, in homes, eateries and even grocery stores.”
“A strain gauge is used to weigh the food item,” explains Harshit. “The user must enter the name of the food item, such as apple; using a pre-constructed database, the nutritional value of the food item is displayed. We can display detailed nutritional information, such as total calories and the contribution from individual food groups such as proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.”
The project uses the ADS0809 data converter to convert the analog weight signal into digital form. The Beagleboard-XM performs the image processing and uses the weight information to calculate the nutritional value. The nutritional information can either be displayed on a display device connected to the scale or transmitted to a phone wirelessly.
“The Beagle Board’s USART serial TX/RX ports are wired to a eZ430-RF2500, which implements the SPI mode of Wi-Fi to emulate a serial (COM port) connection with a Wi-Fi enabled device,” explains Yatin.
The demonstration of the project is available from here.
Take a step forward
Kunal Mehindru and Mohammad Imdad Sadi of Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, worked under the mentorship of Prof. Hema N, on a project entitled “Low-cost Wearable ExoSekeleton for Physically Impaired.”
“Our inspiration for this project came when we watched the video of an exoskeleton built by Ekso Bionics,” says Kunal. “But the cost of this product is in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars. We wanted to make something far more affordable. We have used an exoskeleton assembly in which supports are mounted around the calf and below the hip to support knee. The supports have springs attached to them. The lower support extends down to be linked with foot attached with a servo motor and a photodiode, OPT101.Three motors control the three support structures, and the motors themselves are controlled by two MSP430G2553 microcontrollers. We have used the MSP430 launchpad, which costs only $10.”
“The photodiode attached to the back of foot senses the ground,” explains Mohammad. “It sends a signal to one of the two microcontrollers, which then drives the servo motor attached to the upper support. This causes the stretched spring to relax and results in a bending motion of the knee and a lifting of the foot. When the knee is at an angle of 900, the servo stops and starts moving in the opposite direction, causing the spring to stretch again and straightening the bent knee.”
Watch the demonstration of the project here.
A reading aid for the blind
Kishor Gaikwad, Dhaval Waghuide, Aditya Kadrolkar and Ketan Chitale of College of Engineering, Pune, have worked with Prof. Srinivas Baka on a project entitled “Touchpad to read text document for blind people.”
“Our project offers an alternative to the Braille system,” says Kishor. “It helps a blind person in reading a printed document or a softcopy of a document. It therefore gives the flexibility of reading a document that is not in the Braille text. At present, our system can read English documents, but the system can be extended to read documents in other languages.”
“Our project involves the conversion of plain text to Braille text,” explains Dhaval. “A printed text document is scanned and fed to a PC on the serial port by a microcontroller. A software running on the PC converts the scanned image into text. Solenoid actuators are used to take this text document and create the necessary elevations of the Braille text.”
“A good power supply must be designed to meet the power requirements of the system,” says Aditya. “There are six actuators needed in the Braille system and the current requirement from the supply may be 5A at 18V. We used rectifiers and RC filters to convert AC to DC and precision voltage regulators to generate 12V, 5V and 3.3V needed in the hardware. For load protection, we used TI’s UCC3915 because of its hot-swap capability and circuit breaking capability.”
“ MSP430G2253 launchpad was used to transfer the text letter by letter to the PC,” says Ketan. “We used DRV103, which is especially designed to drive solenoids. PWM operation conserves power and reduces heat rise, resulting in higher reliability. The IC has built-in overcurrent and thermal shutdown.”
“Presently, a single character in English language is converted to its Braille equivalent,” adds Kishor. “It would be a natural extension to convert several characters at a time, so that the blind reader can read speedily.”
View a video demonstration of this project here.
