UW students find creative solutions during weekend hackathon



UW students are on the cutting edge of finding ways to help people with spinal cord injuries and other neurological disorders.

What may look like a table full of tangled cables is actually a table full of tools to help the students build life-changing prototypes.

This is the third year for the UW’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering hackathon.

A team last year built a smart cane for the blind using sensors to help them avoid objects in their path.

“It’s important to further this sense of community for neuro-engineering and make it grow and have an impact on society because that’s the goal of this field and any bioengineering research,” says Nile Wilson, the organizer of the event.

Students get 36 hours to come up with the creation and test it out.

Last year’s winning team built a system for people with facial paralysis to play music with their face muscles.