Project MyPath was created with help from Drs. Vaskar Raychoudhury, Md Osman Gani, and Roger O. Smith. Drs. Raychoudhury, Gani, and Smith all participated in the Fall 2021 Innovation Corps program in order to improve themselves and their project.
Read on to learn more about the MyPath team and their I-Corps experience:
MyPath is a Miami University project that aims to aid wheelchair user navigation and routing capabilities using vibration data. This lets the user avoid damaged sidewalks, steep slopes, and other physical barriers. Dr. Vaskar Raychoudhury, a researcher currently working on the MyPath project, graciously shared some of his experiences with I-Corps and updates on MyPath with us below.
Q: What were your experiences like going through the I-Corps program/how was it beneficial to your startup journeys?
Dr. Vaskar Raychoudhury: “The I-Corps program for me was an eye-opener about how to conduct interviews of the possible customer group to elicit maximum information about their requirement related to our product without giving them a lot of details. We conducted 53 interviews across different places across the entire USA and found very useful information regarding our product. This helped us to re-evaluate our hypotheses and also to identify certain new ones. The I-Corps team was extremely helpful and even over the online mode, they succeeded in building a great classroom spirit and happy and healthy atmosphere. I would like to thank them for teaching us a new way of customer requirement analysis in a short time.”
Q: Any updates on your technology/company that would you like to share?
Dr. Vaskar Raychoudhury: “At this stage, we are going through the transcripts of the interviews we conducted to identify and pinpoint specific user requirements and based on that how we can reorganize the idea of our product. We are planning to do a qualitative analysis of the interview transcripts over the next few weeks. We have recently received a federal research grant on this identical topic titled: “Accessible Routing Using Smart Crowd-Sensed Surface Classification for Wheelchair Users”, from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Administration for Community Living (ACL), Field Initiated Projects (FIP) Program – (Development), National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), $600,000, September 2021 – August 2024.”
Click the headshots below to learn more about each member of MyPath.
Dr. Vaskar Raychoudhury, Ph.D.
Dr. Md Osman Gani, Ph.D.
Dr. Roger O. Smith, Ph.D.