Explore My Work
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CAD Designathon 2025:
Evacu-AID
My team and I were a part of the CAD Designathon 2025 run by MCMaster Design League. We participated in the Accessebility at Mac challenege and we were tasked with coming up with a solution that would make a building at McMaster more accessible.
Project Takeaways
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Creating and constraining assemblies in Solidworks
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Problem identification / Solving
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Design for accessibiility
In this CAD Designathon, my teammates and I were on a time constraint to come up with a way to make McMaster more accessible for it's community.
The biggest lesson I learned over this weekend was not anything technical but it was a perspective lesson. How as an engineer, it is important to think of all individuals with different physical abilities that may use / interact with anything I design.
Although we didn't win, it was a fun weekend working with my friends on this challenge and an overall great experience set up by MDL!
Design Process
My team and I walked around campus and saw that many buildings were already accessible through ramps and elevators as well as push to open buttons and accessible washrooms in every building. As we sat in the PG basement wondering about what we wanted to pursue for this challenge, I noticed a sign on the elevators that read "In case of emergency use stairs". This got me thinkning about how wheelchair users are able to act during cases of emergencies where the elevators are not a safe option.
As we conducted research, we found that this is a problem that many wheelchair users face outside of McMaster as there hasn't been a solution for individuals that allows them to act individually for their safety. The testimonies we found online encouraged us to pursue an idea as a solution for this unfortunate circumstance.
We came up with a sort of wheelchair attachement that supports users as they safely descend the stairwell with an anti-rollback mechanism. The wheel design was based on other concepts for "stair-climbing" wheels for suitcases and small robots. The idea is that the user will be able to easily attach the "climbing" wheels onto their wheelchair and use the customized handrail to pull them up/guide them down the stairs.
We didn't get the chance to complete an actual prototype of the wheel spokes as personal commitments intefered with our limited time constraint however, the indsutry professionals and judges that we presented to were very intrigued by our solution as they had not seen anyone else address this issue.
Final Concept Design
