HULL, MASS. (WHDH) - It may not look like much but this cardboard contraption is no small step.
It’s called the Vision Path, and it was invented by 18-year-old Jake Smith, who graduated from Hull High School this weekend and came up with the idea after volunteering at a local senior center and helping his grandmother and great-grandmother who had vision and mobility disabilities.
“She kept banging her walker into the walls,” he recalled. “So, when she kept banging her walker into the walls, it was all dented.”
So Jake designed a walker that beeped when something was in the way and told the user how to avoid it. The closer you get to the object, the more frequent the sound and the higher the pitch.
So as you get closer you get the more frequent the sound is and the higher the pitch is.
“It’s kind of like a car braking system. I added some red lights too. A voice to text speech module. I used Red Bull cans to be able to vibrate,” he told 7NEWS.
He entered the design into the MIT hackathon competition for coders and his creativity landed him in first place.
Jake has earned seven different scholarships and plans to keep working on his designs and hopes to improve on his walker — one step at a time.
He plan to attend UMass Lowell in the fall the study electrical engineering.
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