Greetings,
My name is Salome Makasi, a 3rd year student at St. Paul’s university. I am pursuing an undergraduate degree in Computing and Information Systems and I’m a Co-Founder at Zerobionic.
In a world where education seems to be the only tool we can use to bring impact, At Zerobionic, we are ensuring that students living with disability have access to STEM related careers through Recycled 3d robotic prosthesis arms. Our aim is to ensure that these students have a wide range of careers to pursue and are not limited since their curriculum mainly focuses on basic communication, something which puts careers in Engineering or Robotics field out of reach for them.
Zerobionic is a human arm prosthesis trained on a STEM dataset for transcribing STEM related topics, that is the tutor, teacher, trainer, engineer trains via talking either remotely or onsite and the prosthesis signs the words to the student. On the other hand, the deaf student or dumb student signs to the robotic arm and the signs are transcribed to the trainer from wherever point. The interface on the student’s side on recognizing key words from the trainer i.e., when talking about servos in robotics pops up an image of the servo to foster understanding. As a co-founder, I envision a world where disability does not have to limit what careers we pursue and living in a society where people living with disability are included in our systems.
Working on such a startup hasn’t been without its hurdles. Balancing school work and the many hours needed for the project and training the data sets was a bit challenging in the beginning, however with team work and good time management, we managed to turn this vision to a reality. Through partnerships with organizations such as Young Scientist Kenya, we managed to do pilot tests in marginalized areas such as Garissa and Machakos and the results were heartwarming. From our first prototype 10 trainers and over a 100 deaf students reported an elevated interest in STEM related courses where none was evident.
Zerobionic has received recognition from organizations such as Kenya Climate Innovation(KCIC) and The Global Learning Council.
Our next steps include producing the prosthesis arms and getting them to schools and for this step we urge all interested investors to help us scale this idea to the next level.
You can reach us through our social media pages (https://linktr.ee/zerobionic) or email us at: zerobionicteam@gmail.com.
