Blackwood Design Award winner going for gold

Sometimes life seems like it is a series of obstacles to conquer. Now, a major sporting event taking place in Switzerland in October 2016 is turning those real life obstacles into obstacle races. The winning entry in the Blackwood Student Design Award 2014 will be taking part.

It’s now over six months since Kirubin Pillay from Imperial College, London won the Blackwood Student Design Award 2014 with a prototype for a natural 'look where you want to go' eye control wheelchair for people with Locked-in Syndrome and other severe motor disabilities.

Because eye movement is controlled by the brain stem rather than the spinal cord, even quadriplegic people retain eye movement. The system tracks eye movement using 2 infra-red cameras. Competitive systems require users to look at a screen, a potential distraction. Kirubin’s system does away with the screen, allowing users to look directly where they are going and making controlling the chair much more intuitive. To reverse, the user looks down.

Since winning the Award, Kirubin has moved on to University of Oxford. However the team at Imperial College is continuing to develop the chair, making it lighter for example. The eye control system can also be modified to be used with other models of electric wheelchair.

In October 2016, Imperial College will be taking the chair to Zurich to compete in Cybathlon. Dubbed the Bionic Olympics, Cybathlon is actually more than straight sport. Instead participants will be competing, using assistive technologies, in challenges with direct relevance to difficulties experienced on a day to day basis by people with disabilities. The ultimate aim of Cybathlon is to encourage further development of these assistive technologies and to raise awareness of the obstacles people with disabilities face on a daily basis. Over 45 teams will participate, including athletes who use powered assistive technology and are therefore not eligible to compete in the Paralympics.

The wheelchair pilot will navigate a range of obstacle courses, featuring everyday obstacles such as stairs, ramps, doors and cobbles, with the winner selected on the basis of both time taken and skills displayed.

The event organisers held a trial event for participants in July 2015, with the aim of perfecting course design before the main event. The Imperial team took bronze.

Sivashankar Sivakanthan was the chair ‘pilot’ (as the participants are called). “It was fantastic,” he says of the trial event. “I was really amazed by how stable the chair was going through the circuit. The eye controlled movement was really nice. You look where you’re going and the chair would move in that direction.”

The eye control system originally took him around five to ten minutes to learn, some of that time coming from him having head mobility and having to get used to not turning his head because the chair is designed for those who can’t.

He thinks that the chair would be brilliant for real life use, although he personally would also like to be able to fold it for transport in his car. However he says that as it currently is, it is perfect for quadriplegic users.

In fact he feels that eye control gave him an advantage over other pilots in the race. “In terms of mobility and control it was really easy to use it around the slalom. The control aspect was really seamless,” he says. “I want to turn left – I look left.”

The Imperial team also had other advantages. “We were the biggest team, the youngest team and the team to produce the lowest cost wheelchair,” he says. “Our chair design is very cheap and effective.”

As a result of the Cybathlon practice event, the wheelchair system will require adjustment to deal with bumpy terrain, camber and other issues. The chair also does not currently tackle stairs.

“There’s going to be a redesign to make it even better so next year when we compete and it goes live on TV we can get a really nice medal,” says Sivashankar. “Going for gold!”

Blackwood Design Award winner going for gold

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