Questions and Answers

 

Iniitial project questions

1. What was the major objective of your project and what was your plan to achieve it? 

    a. Was that goal the result of any specific situation, experience, or problem you encountered?  

    b. Were you trying to solve a problem, answer a question, or test a hypothesis?

（Answer for the entire question 1)

It was hard to understand how my grandmother felt every day. Back at my home in Shanghai, our family lived in a typical high-rise apartment building. Every time my grandmother visited us, my parents would be busy working while I was at school. Most of the time, she was alone in the apartment. As an older adult with knee problems, living on the fourteenth floor became her biggest obstacle to going anywhere freely. Although she is still able to walk, she is unable to do so on long distances and needs support to stand up. For long, lonely days, she simply sat on the balcony or gazed out of the window, looking at a world she ought to enjoy yet could not.

I never quite understood how that felt — to repeatedly sit in the same spot and somehow become a prisoner in her own home — until I had to endure a two-week quarantine last summer. The suffocation of not being able to go anywhere apart from a small hotel room measuring ten by five steps hit me hard, and all of a sudden, I understood.

However, this dire reality does not just happen to my grandmother, especially with China’s fast-growing aging population. She is but a representation of a group of handicapped people suffering in modern cities.

As soon as I got out of quarantine, I took this realization, hoping to develop a product that could provide mobility to those who incessantly suffer. This gave rise to my innovation, the Standing Mobility Device.

 

2. What were the major tasks you had to perform in order to complete your project?

Since this is an Engineering project that I’m doing by myself, there are mainly two parts that I had to focus on: The mechanical part, and the programming part, but beforehand, I did some research on current situations and on my project’s background information and some similar products in the market.

For my project, the mechanical part has a bigger role than the programming part, since I need to build an entire car-like device, but I only have to program the device for it to work under two functions. However, since I’m more advanced in the mechanical area compared to programming, the programming part was the bigger challenge for me.

In general, the device is made up of the base, which includes wheels, footrests, and a base structure made of Aluminum bars; the seating area, which includes a seat for people to sit on as well as its supporting; the steering and supporting front area, which includes an armrest and buttons and a rocker to control the whole device.

This is a dual-system device that includes two kinds of functions. The first mode is the seat adjustment mode. Under this mode, there are two buttons on the front area. One button ascends the seat to a standing position and the other descends the seat to a sitting position. If the top button on the rocker is pressed, the device switches into the second mode, moving mode. Under this mode, the device can be driven around in all directions by controlling the rocker. If the top button on the rocker is pressed again, the mode changes back to the seat adjustment mode.

 

3. What is new or novel about your project?

    a. Is there some aspect of your project's objective, or how you achieved it that you haven't done before?

Before this research project, I have never done a complete Engineering research project before, so I would say that this whole experience is brand new for me.

In the meantime, I am thrilled to develop something for the first time that can help vulnerable groups of people.

In the Engineering class I had in school, we did have some minor creations, such as designing a cardboard chair, but I never conducted complete research based on my own plans. Therefore, the process of making a research plan and following it for the project duration is new to me. In the mechanical building process, I got to use machines to cut materials or drill holes by myself for the first time. This is also new to me. I did my own critical thinking of what to do for the next step and finally assembled everything to be a complete project while solving problems on the way. This is a brand-new experience as well.

However, what’s even newer for me must be the programming. I have never had any experience in programming or Arduino. By learning knowledge using online resources and consulting friends that knew how to program as well as teachers, I completed programming for my project. It was insane, but it turned out to be successful in the end!

Moreover, now that I’m participating in this science fair as well as writing a paper for my project, this is something new to me as well! I’m really excited to see how it goes.

    b. Is your project's objective, or the way you implemented it, different from anything you have seen?

I believe my project is innovative in the following aspects:

1. Multi-functional: my projects combined two functions together, while some similar products only have one of them.

2. Cost-effective: considering that our target group includes elderly people who may be retired or disabled people who are disadvantaged in job opportunities, it is essential that our device can be affordable. According to research, the cost of developing this product is about one-tenth the price of similar products currently on market.

3. Can change to  ANY  Position: For the seating, the seat can not only be in the vertical, or standing position, and the horizontal, or sitting position. The seat can stop anywhere between these two angles as the user likes.

4. Easy to Learn, User friendly: Since our target group includes elderly people and so on, who may not be familiar with technology, this device is designed to be easy to control, as it only consists of two buttons and a rocker/joystick.

5. No Additional Strength Needed: When the user uses this device, their body can be really relaxed, greatly reducing fatigue.

6. Safe to Use: included safety measures while designing the device. For example, the base is a triangular shape for stability; knee pads, seatbelts, and handrails are attached to stabilize the user while in motion; the speeds of the seat and driving are designed to be neutral and stable, etc.

7. Independence: once the user uses this device, he or she no longer needs additional help in daily life from other people because of their lower limb difficulties.

    c. If you believe your work to be unique in some way, what research have you done to confirm that it is?

Before starting to build the device, I did research on similar products currently in the market to see what situation we are in and what potential problems the products may have. I also researched the current status of disabled people in different countries.

4. What was the most challenging part of completing your project?

   a. What problems did you encounter, and how did you overcome them?

As mentioned above, the biggest challenge I had to overcome was probably having to program for the first time ever in my life. I didn’t exactly overcome it, because I believe that I’m in a slowly climbing process of learning to program.

For the seating to ascend and descend, my idea was to imitate how human legs function, so I combined two Aluminum bars representing the thigh and the calf, with a steering gear linking the bars and representing the knee. However, after testing, the steering gears do not provide enough torque to hold a human on top, so an electric putter had to be added. But the gears work in radians, while the putter has a linear motion. The two objects couldn’t collaborate with each other, and I burnt a component because they stalled each other… Eventually, the steering gears were abandoned completely.

   b. What did you learn from overcoming these problems?

The overcoming process made me deal with problems in a calmer way. I learned to focus on solving them instead of being frustrated. Afterall, engineering is problem-solving, including the problems I may counter while working on things. Overcoming the problems helped me think like a real engineer.

5. If you were going to do this project again, are there any things you would do differently the next time?

I would say that the general method of creating this project won’t be completely changed, but there are a few things I believe can be done better / improved:

For future work, I believe we can further improve this research project in the following aspects: Using an electrical putter is the most straightforward way to realize the function of ascendable and descendable seats. Although it is already very stable, the stability of using an electric putter for a considerable number of years is still a question. Therefore, for future improvements, the electric putter can be changed into a linkage mechanism for further stability. In the current design, the seat belt that the person should be wearing while using the device, the knee pads, and the handrails are all designed out of stability and safety considerations.

In addition, with two universal wheels in use, it is likely that the device is going to drift a little before moving in the desired direction. In the future, only one universal wheel should be used, and the wheel should be of a spherical shape instead of the ones that change direction as the motion goes on.

When the person controls the device to stop moving, the front wheels stop, as desired, but I firmly believe that adding a brake system to the device is necessary, in case of emergency. 

Finally, the final product put onto the market cannot look like such a steel skeleton, hence beautification and packaging of the device are essential.

6. Did working on this project give you any ideas for other projects? 

  The experience on this project encouraged me a lot in all kinds of ways. Among all, I was most proud and inspired by how I got to serve society and help people in need using my own abilities. I had this childhood experience of going to the hospital for infusion and observing various problems that can be improved regarding the intravenous (IV) stands and the infusion department. Now that this project greatly encouraged me to do more, I have already started to work on this new project: creating an autonomous clip-on component for conventional IV stands for easier hospital infusion. I firmly believe that if this project can be adopted worldwide, it is going to be a blast.

7. How did COVID-19 affect the completion of your project?

Interestingly, COVID-19 indirectly benefited my project. It was the quarantine that COVID brought that led me to think about the original problem behind this project, which is how painful it is not to be able to stand up and move around freely. I definitely wouldn’t thank COVID for that, but COVID did contribute to changing my mindset and reminding me to think of this world in a more empathic way.