Anambra students invent smart walking sticks for the blind

Some respite might be coming the way of members of the visually impaired community as some students from the Regina Pacis Secondary School, Onitsha in Anambra State, have invented "Smart Sticks" for easy navigation.

Pulse reports that the Regina Pacis Secondary School has built a reputation for producing students with innovative ideas as pupils from the school had developed a mobile application called the Fake Drug (FD) detector to help tackle fake pharmaceutical products in Nigeria.

The feat earned the students the 2018 Junior Gold Awards in the World Technovation Challenge in the United States of America, but the school has now gone a notch higher.

Putting into work their robotics and coding skills, female pupils from the school have now invented smart sticks that can detect obstacles not less than 120 centimetres away from a blind person.

Speaking at an event to launch the innovation on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, the Youth Coordinator, Nigeria Association of the Blind (NAB), Anambra State, Chibuzor Obierika, said the product was improved upon its first test, Channels Television reports.

Obierika was quoted as saying, “After building this project, we noticed it could only sense obstacles horizontally in front of the blind man, so we decided to advance this project. The Smart Sticks can now sense objects from an angle of elevation and an angle of depression.

“The Smart Sticks are designed with an input ultrasonic sensor that alerts a blind person of an obstacle not less than 120 centimetres ahead of him or her.'

The Smart Sticks were reviewed by some visually impaired persons at the event and some of them expressed their joy over the innovation.

A member of the blind community who spoke said, “I feel very much elated. In today’s society, visually impaired people have gone past the era of being perceived as being incapable of contributing to societal development.

“These Smart Sticks would go a long way in helping them live a life of independence.”