Two German Teenagers Built A Low-Cost, Eye-Controlled Wheelchair

Myrijam Stoetzer and Paul Foltin placed first in an engineering competition for German youths with the wheelchair design they built; it’s an eye-controlled wheelchair with low-cost parts, such as 3D-printed wheels. These two teens have made their design open-source and encourage others to iterate upon their core concept, which Stoetzer has laid out in detail on her blog. On their hackaday project page, Stoetzer emphasizes that “we wanted our project to be as cheap as possible to be affordable for everyone. Our aim is that this approach can be used widely and rebuild for people in need.”

Stoetzer and Foltin also taught themselves how to code while building this project, so it’s not like they started out as complete experts — they had an idea, then they learned how to make it and improve upon it as they went. Almost enough to make you want to learn to code yourself and help out with iterating more accessibility tech, doesn’t it?

(via The Daily Dot, image via Hackaday)

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