Duxi

Inspiration

Children with fine motor deficits often have difficulty participating in activities such as drawing. To aid them, somebody may help the child using hand-over-hand assistance whereby the helper places his or her hand over the child's and guides the child in the correct movements. While this is a simple solution, it may not always be best. Not all children like hand-over-hand assistance as they may not find it meaningful, motivating, or there may not be anyone around to help them. During Hack the North, we set out to solve this problem.

What it does

Duxi takes hand-over-hand assistance and transforms it such that the child could draw independently with the help of a black box system. The "black box" takes assistance from above the child's hands to below. Underneath its translucent screen, a 2 axis plotter printer uses magnets to guide the child's pencil or crayon. This method of assistance could provide the child with greater motivation, sense of accomplishment, and self esteem. Not to mention that there may not always be someone around to provide hand-over-hand assistance.

How we built it

Duxi was built based on the Cartesio 2 axis plotter system ( (http://robottini.altervista.org/cartesio-low-cost-cartesian-plotter-robot), the plotter was adapted in a way to allow guidance to the user.

Challenges we ran into

We've never worked with motors before! It was definitely a learning experience. Even though there were some instructions on how to build the plotter, they weren't always clear.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We made the motors work! Plus we made something cool that could actually help people (:

What's next for Duxi

It could have rehabilitative applications (since children's brains are fairly plastic perhaps we could enhance the weak connections causing the fine motor deficits), it would be nice to learn more about that! Also some more features e.g. implementing an electromagnet to adapt to different levels of motor deficit or a app through which users could upload an image they wish to draw on Duxi or customize magnetic strength or speed.

Built With

• arduino
• gcode