Believe it or not, these are not part of any science yarns—a wheelchair that obeys your command, a text-and-hire technology for autorickshaw passengers, a battery-powered robotic arm for workers handling hazardous jobs.
These hard-to believe science concepts are some of the six innovative projects thought up by the State’s engineering students and selected by the Startup Village, India’s first telecom incubator and the Kerala Chapter of IEEE Communication Society (ComSoc), to give shape to them.
The sure-fire projects were picked up at a talent hunt held to find fertile projects by Kerala’s engineering students in communication technologies and applications.
“We selected these projects not only for their innovativeness but also for their usefulness to the public,” said chairperson of the governing board of Startup Village Sanjay Vijayakumar. He hoped the concepts would soon fire up and get going in the market.
The ‘intelligent wheelchair’, ideated by five students of the Sahrdaya College of Engineering Technology at Kodakara in Thrissur, can be driven around through retina movement, voice or a lever. The three options will make the chair a favourite among people with physical, visual or speech disabilities.
The chair will sport sensors to keep an eye on obstructions and a gadget to shoot off messages to the doctor if the patient falls sick.
‘Smartmotive’, another wheelchair prototype developed by students of the Government Engineering College in Thrissur, helps a physically disabled person stand upright. It can be controlled by retina and facial muscle movements or sound.
‘SMS Vehicle Locating Solution’ proposed by a team of students from the College of Engineering in Thiruvananthapuram seeks to end the wait for hiring an auto.
All that a person needs to do is to send a text message with his exact location. The message, along with the fare, will fly to the inbox of auto drivers in the vicinity. This makes it easy for auto drivers to make it to the location. Don’t worry, you won’t need a smartphone to work this application.
Students of Mar Baselios College of Engineering and Technology have come up with a project, S.T.A.R.K (Scientifically Trained Arm-Robotic Kinesis), which aims at fashioning a battery-powered, lightweight exoskeletal framework of an arm for people at potentially dangerous workspaces or those who have lost a limb.
Mr. Vijayakumar said Startup Village would bear 50 per cent of the total project cost of Rs 2, 54, 000 to incubate the ideas.
“We will also provide technical assistance for groups working on speech recognition by introducing them to Nuance, the world leader in Speech Recognition technologies, and powering solutions like Siri in iPhone. Groups working on sensor-based device will be introduced to Wi-finity, a company based in Bangalore,” he said. All 164 colleges in the State were covered in the drive that handpicked projects.