NAVAID

Autonomous wheelchairs exist. They cost more than most people can spend and they arrive as an entire new chair, which means giving up the one already fitted to your body.

Navaid is the other route: a sensor and screen module that mounts to the chair someone already owns, drives it to a destination they picked, and lets a family member see where it went.

A friend put me in touch with an artist who uses a manual chair daily, and we talked it through over a video call. What they described was never distance.

It was cost. Ramps that satisfy a code somewhere still strain arms and shoulders several times a day, and a full day of propelling cuts short whatever was planned next.

They own a modified car and still cannot stow the chair in a tight space without help. Galleries that call themselves accessible turn out to have doors with no opener and aisles too narrow to turn in.

The caregiver app is the part that could go wrong quietly. Location sharing between a disabled adult and their family is support in one direction and monitoring in the other, so pairing is explicit and the app carries nothing beyond position and status.

The system also does not pretend to replace a caregiver. Medication and routine checks stay human work. What autonomy removes is needing another person present for every trip down the street.

A screen you look at for hours is an ergonomics problem before it is an interface problem, so the module was built full size in MDF first, as a standalone model rather than mounted to a chair. The display landed at 195 by 135 millimetres on a stand that angles toward the user's head rather than sitting flat.

On screen, sensor readings draw the surroundings on the left so you can see whether the system noticed the truck, and saved destinations sit on the right, changing between indoor and outdoor sets.

The project ended with a physical model at real dimensions, a screen design tested against how a person actually sits, and an app that stays on the right side of the line between support and monitoring. It reframed the brief from building a better wheelchair to removing the reasons people cannot use the good ones.

The whole palette exists to protect a single colour. Black is the chassis, a slightly lifted grey is every panel and control, white is every label, and red belongs to Emergency Stop and to nothing else on any screen.

That rule is the system. A chair moving under its own power is a machine with real consequences, and an interface that spends red on a delete confirmation or an error toast has already spent the thing it needed. Type sits heavier than a phone would, because this screen is read outdoors, at an angle, in motion.