During my Junior year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Washington, I took part in a techsandbox competition through the Centre for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.
We had 3 months to come up with, implement and test an idea that had sensorimotor applications and could feasibly be pushed towards commercialisation. Our team came up with a vestibuliar device that could fit inside a hearing aid and help people suffering from vertigo to reorientate themselves. The device worked by emitting a point source sound that would stay stationary in percieved space no matter the orientation of the user. Using IMU’s we could track users head movements and if a specific motion occured that closely resembled the motion before fainting, then the audio source would trigger.
This work was primarily done in unity and my work specifcally looked into the fall detection algorithm that we used.
This was an extremely fun competition and the judging panel (which included representatives from Intel labs) awarded us top prize. You can read more about the competition here. Following this, we did collaborative work within the university to test the device on patients with a varity of vestibular disorders but unfortnately the majority of the team (myself included) graduated before this could be completed.
This work was conducted with Justin Vrana, Maitham Naeemi, and Nile Wilson