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Assistive technology

DavIO

A prototype entertainment and communication system that lets a non-verbal adult with severe disabilities trigger sounds, lights, and scenes from a set of physical buttons or a web app.

Role
Designer & Developer
Raspberry PiPythonJavaScriptGPIOWLEDCircuit design

Draft case study, scaffolded from project notes. Refine the narrative before publishing.

Context

DavIO is a prototype entertainment and communication system I built for my brother, an adult with severe physical and mental disabilities. The goal was to give him a way to make choices on his own — to select between several buttons and play sounds, trigger lights, or activate whatever he wanted in the moment.

Approach

The system runs on a Raspberry Pi, wiring physical buttons through GPIO and driving addressable lighting via WLED, with custom circuit design to tie the hardware together. It can also be controlled through a web app. Different modes let it switch between arbitrary “scenes” — Communication, Entertainment, and Night — so the same set of buttons takes on different meaning depending on the context.

Outcome

A working prototype that gave my brother a measure of agency and choice, and a flexible scene-based foundation to keep building on.