Junction 2018: A team of Makers UPV wins the Future Cities category of the biggest hackaton in Europe with GuideMe
A team of Makers UPV, the student community of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) that transcends the merely academic field, has achieved victory in one of the 11 categories of Junction, the largest hackaton in Europe, held at the University of Aalto (Espoo, Finland), in which they have also achieved the 4th place in the general classification. The team, integrated by Jaime Laborda Macario and Iván Torres Játiva, both students of electronic engineering; Enrique Miralles Dolz, of nuclear fusion engineering; Joaquín Montesinos Muñoz, of telecommunications engineering; and Matías Fernández Patón, of biomedical engineering; has been imposed in the Future Cities category with GuideMe, pocketing a cash prize of 1,000 euros. In the hackaton, carried out in collaboration with the Movesense platform, more than 1,400 developers from around 100 from different countries have participated, who have had to face the challenges posed by fifty prestigious companies of Facebook, Daimler, Supercell, Nokia or Intel.
GuideMe, the definitive solution to improve mobility for the elderly and people with disabilities in a connected city
To achieve its success, Jaime, Iván, Enrique, Joaquín and Matías developed GuideMe, a comprehensive solution for the exterior orientation of the elderly or disabled in a connected city, through a fully functional cane that provides clear and concise directions to move between different points of the city, improving their quality of life. The system, which in turn allows the instant sending of information to avoid slopes or sidewalks in poor condition, or know the real state of the traffic lights, is open to implementation in public places such as hospitals or train stations, in addition to facilitating emergency interventions.
Development of proof of concept prototype
In the words of the award-winning team, they have developed «a proof-of-concept prototype to test and demonstrate the technology.» The walking stick concept test consists primarily of an intelligent handle with some electronic components, such as an LED array with a compass. digital (MicroBit) and a WiFi node to transmit all the information between the GuideMe smart stick and the web application server and the GUI. » In turn, «the electronics of the handle consists of a MicroBit board with a 5×5 LED array and a digital compass connected to an ESP8266 WiFi microcontroller that acts as an IoT node to transmit information to and from the server. It is integrated in a handle printed in 3D as a box with the stick.The MicroBit board is programmed using MicroPython, an efficient implementation of the Python 3 programming language optimized to run on microcontrollers.Wemos ESP8266 is programmed using Arduino IDE, a creation platform of open-source electronic prototypes that allows users to create interactive electronic objects. » «In addition,» they add, «we have also developed a graphical user interface for demonstration purposes that indicates in real time the location of the older person holding the club, which could be used by adults to know the location of their relatives. The web application is updated with every movement that the elderly person makes and is able to optimize the best way to reach the objective location «. «For the web application, the backend API is developed entirely using PHP and is combined with HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery and AJAX for the interface», the winners conclude.