At a tender age of 13, she kept watching her grandmother suffer from strokes and pushed all around the compound in a wheelchair due to her inability. This is how our Inoovator today grew up to with a sense of affection for the disabled.
Now, at the age of 21, Gloria Nalujjumwa, pursuing a Diploma in Computing at Uganda Technology and Management University (UTAMU), couldn’t look any further for her final year project than generating an idea of a wheel chair that can be vocally controlled in Luganda, a local language understood by millions in this country.
Having attained adequate skills in her class, Nalujjumwa and her colleague that she engaged, there on built a prototype of a control unit, which according to her, took them three months.
“We built a control unit that can just be mounted onto the wheelchair. The user can thereafter just issue vocal commands in Luganda to which the wheelchair functions,” Nalujjumwa explains.
How it works
Nalujjumwa clarifies that the control unit consists of motors which are able to move and steer the wheels mounted on the wheel chair which minimizes the burden of someone having to push it.
The Artificial Intelligence Wheelchair operates based on voice-command keywords which include : Maaso (front), Mabega (back), ku kkono(left), ku dyo(right) and sitopu (stop).
“My colleague and I preferred to use ‘Sitopu’ because ‘Komaawo’ wasn’t working well with the programming. Once the user speaks these words towards the microphone mounted on the wheel chair, it moves accordingly. So, we have double plug-ins; the speech plug-in and another that controls the motors for movement,” Nalujjumwa says.
Challenges
The biggest challenge of this whole project according to Nalujjumwa, is mispronunciation of the Luganda syllables as the user has to have a rich pronunciation of Luganda words.
She also mentions that the requisites of building up the system are expensive for the fact they were imported from outside Uganda.
Reviews
Mpindi Bumali, the chairman National Union of Disabled Persons in Uganda (NUDIPU) says that the innovation is definitely a step in the right direction when it comes to employing technology in People With Disabilities (PWDs), especially if it is cheaper and affordable because PWDs struggle with access.
Allan Nyesiga, the head of the department of Computer Science and Engineering at UTAMU applauded the two for coming up with such a relevant project saying students have started to learn and understand what innovations are, and the reason why they need to innovate.
The two partners currently have a sample in place, which they hope to improve with time, before they can finally release into the market.
You must be logged in to post a comment.