Welcome to Our Senior Design Project
Project Title: Parapedal
Description: Our project helps disabled people reach the full range of a piano by enabling them to control piano pedals through an accessible interface.
Group Members
Project Overview
The Parapedal is an assistive technology device designed to enable piano players with lower-body mobility challenges to operate piano pedals using a mouthguard. Our solution maintains the expressiveness and nuance of traditional pedal operation while adapting to the user's physical capabilities.
Project Motivation
The idea of building a piano assistance device for people in wheelchairs was inspired by one of our group members, Benedict Eberhagen. He learned how to play the piano at a young age, however he stopped for a while. More recently, he has been picking it back up. However, he is now playing with one major change - he is currently in a wheelchair.
His progress working on and improving his piano playing has been going great. However, since he is now in a wheelchair and incapable of using his legs, he is unable to play most of his piano pieces properly, he is unable to activate the piano pedals at the bottom of the piano.
Although the usage of pedals isn't necessary to play a piece successfully, it does enhance the quality and sound of the piano piece. With that, our motivation is to help Benedict play the piano properly once more, as well as helping other people with physical disabilities - paraplegics in particular - to be able to activate the foot pedal in an easy and intuitive way.
Our product will help our target customers reach the full potential and range of sounds that a piano has to offer. Benedict is an intermediate-level piano player with a decent background in understanding how to play, but he is not at the professional level. Our build will be focused around that factor as well. We will design our device to be more beginner-level and intermediate-level friendly, instead of making it overly complicated and designed for professional-level play.
Team Background
Our team consists of 4 Electrical Engineers, so our main focus on this project will be on the hardware of the remote-activated piano pedals, instead of the software.
Andre Llanos
PCB design expertise from work and research experience
Jason Knaebel
Strong background in PCB design from professional experience
Rafael Molina
Experience in power distribution and electrical design from internships
Benedict Eberhagen
Software design experience from internships and personal projects
This diverse set of skills allows us to approach the Parapedal project from multiple engineering perspectives, ensuring a robust and well-designed final product.
Project Documents
Below are the documents and resources related to our Parapedal project: