Aspiring Engineers Invent A Smart Walker To Help Keep Seniors Safe

Two young Carmel Valley students put their growing engineering skills to good use to create the Smart Walker, a device to help detect and prevent falls in seniors.

Declan Henckels and Guhan Senthil, newly-minted freshmen at Canyon Crest Academy, took their project to the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair in the spring and won first place in the engineering category and the grand award in the middle school division. They went on to compete in the California State Science Fair where they again were awarded first place in the junior division for electronics and electromagnetics.

The boys won $1,250 in prize money from the two fairs, split between the two aspiring engineers.

Declan and Guhan started working on the Smart Walker last October when they were still eighth grade students at Pacific Trails Middle School. They teamed up as they both had an interest in engineering, robotics and building things.

They both were also interested in helping seniors.

“Our grandparents have both suffered falls and pretty bad injuries for these falls and we wanted to have our product help people who are suffering the same problems as our grandparents,” Guhan said. “We wanted to tackle that through an engineering project which would be really affordable and reachable for many different kinds of people.”

The project was based on their grandparents but they realized their project could have a really big impact as every year 47,000 elderly fall injuries are treated in U.S. emergency rooms, many of them using walkers.

“That is a big number and we wanted to solve it,” said Declan, whose heart for helping seniors also includes visiting with residents at Westmont Senior Community in Carmel Valley.

As they developed their project, they gained insight by meeting with local experts including Erica Sell the owner of Harmony Home Medical, a medical supply company and neuro-physical therapist Helen Chan who works with elderly patients at Scripps.

Working on the project’s hardware at home, they went through a challenging process of finding the right kind of sensors to use as Declan said some just wouldn’t work. At some points, they worried they wouldn’t complete their project in time.

Their successfully finished product has three different kinds of working sensors, including one that detects how far the person is from the walker and one that is based on the treadmill.

“If you use a treadmill there’s a clip attached and if you get really far at the end of the treadmill, it will stop it for safety. We did that with a string and a sensor that would detect if there was a magnet there or not,” Guhan explained. “If a person fell back and detached from the walker it would automatically trigger a fall and send out a notification.”

A gyroscope on the Smart Walker measures tilt and acceleration and if the person is shaking and moving it a lot.

The person uses the walker during a learning mode and all of the data from the sensors is uploaded to the cloud for processing. They are able to use that data to form a profile for the person’s walking pattern.

After learning all the walk patterns for the user, when the walker is in use in monitoring mode, the data is tracked and it can detect any abnormalities and send notifications to hopefully avoid a fall, Declan said.

The fall warning and fall detection notifications can be set up to be sent to a caregiver, spouse or nursing home staff.

Guhan’s grandmother tried out the Smart Walker but thankfully never fell with it: “I’m very confident that it would work,” he said.

Taking the Smart Walker to the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair, they weren’t sure what to expect but had prepped by practicing giving their presentation to their dogs Luca and Duke. At the competition, about 20 judges came by and interviewed them about the Smart Walker and they offered product demos.

During the award ceremony, the winners were announced in a slide show.

“When they were announcing third and second we were sad that we didn’t get it, we thought there was no way we would get first,” Declan said.

“We just saw our name and I couldn’t believe it at all,” Guhan said

The California State Science Fair was a little different experience,—it was held online and they were on Zoom, never certain when the judges would pop in and ask them questions.

When they were also named the winners of that competition, it was a further recognition of their partnership and their achievement in getting the walker working and accurate.

“I was telling Guhan in the beginning it would be so cool if we actually get this done and we did,” Declan said. “And now we have a prototype.”

Believing that the Smart Walker could have a real-life impact, Declan and Guhan have been researching ways to bring the product to market. They think the cost could be reasonable, not manufacturing a walker but creating it as an attachment.

The research is ongoing as they figure out next steps— they have to start high school first.

In addition to Declan and Guhan, Pacific Trails and CCA had several scientists successfully compete in the Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair. Pacific Trails students Yaalini Kathiravan and Arunchalam Vinayagam won the grand award for their project in the computational biology and bioinformatics category, and Steven Chen won in the earth and environmental science category.

In the senior division, CCA’s Sarah Gao won the grand award in the earth and environmental science category and went on to take third at the state competition. Arnav Dagar also won the grand award in the computer science and systems software category and placed second in the state.

It’s never too early to start working on projects for this year’s fair. Learn more here: gsdsef.org