Why I built the Smart Walking Stick
Every engineering project starts somewhere. For me, it started at home, watching my grandfather.
It started with my grandad
My grandfather lives with Parkinson's disease. Watching him face the daily challenges it brings, the unpredictability of freezing episodes, the loss of independence, the quiet frustration of a body that doesn't always respond the way it should, was what first made me want to do something about it.
When it came to choosing my final year dissertation project, this felt like the only choice. I didn't want to design something abstract for the sake of an academic exercise. I wanted to build something that could genuinely make a difference to his life, and to the lives of the millions of other people around the world living with Parkinson's every day.
That feeling, of wanting to build something that actually helps, has driven every decision in this project from the very beginning.
What freezing of gait is
Freezing of gait is one of the most debilitating symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The brain sends the signal to walk, but the feet suddenly fail to respond, as if glued to the floor. Episodes strike without warning: in a doorway, at a kerb, mid-conversation. They raise the risk of falls and, over time, chip away at a person's confidence to move independently at all.
What makes it so compelling as an engineering problem is that an evidence-based response already exists. Research consistently shows that providing an external rhythm, whether auditory, haptic or visual, can help people with Parkinson's break out of a freeze and re-establish a walking rhythm. Clinicians call this external cueing.
What I built, and what it taught me
What most people with Parkinson's don't have is an affordable, compact device that delivers external cueing in something they already use every day. Existing multimodal cueing devices, like the Rollz Motion Rollator, are expensive, bulky and designed for people who already need a walking frame. There was a clear gap for something aimed at people with earlier-stage Parkinson's who still use a walking stick, and as a mechanical engineer that looked like exactly the kind of problem I should try to solve.
So for my final year dissertation I built one: a walking stick that delivers a rhythmic beat, a vibration in the handle and a laser line on the floor, controlled from a companion app. It meant hardware failures, software bugs, wiring problems and more late nights than I can count. Each problem left a lesson behind.
From breadboard to PCB
The tangle of breadboard wiring was fragile and failure-prone, so I designed a custom printed circuit board that consolidates every connection onto a single board.
Listen to the users
People with Parkinson's found the red laser hard to see under indoor lighting, so future iterations will use a green laser. The best design feedback came from the people the stick is for.
Don't depend on a phone
In the middle of a freezing episode, reaching for a screen isn't realistic. That single insight from that feedback is shaping Prototype 2, which puts physical buttons on the stick itself.
April 2026: the support group
In April 2026 I presented the prototype to the Parkinson's UK Southend support group. People held the stick, felt the vibration in the handle, heard the beat, and told me it was something they would genuinely want to use. It was one of the most meaningful experiences of my engineering career so far.
It was a demonstration, not a trial, but the feedback was specific. Two of the lessons above came from that session, and the feature people asked for most was for the stick to recognise a freeze on its own, which is now part of the research.
The demonstration led to conversations with Parkinson's UK Tech Partnerships and with PD Buddy, a Parkinson's assistive technology business.
The research
The project now continues as a Master of Research at Swansea University, supervised by Eifion Jewell and Ben Morgan. Three things sit in front of it.
Prototype 2
A smaller, lower-power processor and physical buttons on the handle, so the stick works without a phone. The feedback from the support group was clear: in the middle of a freeze, reaching for a screen isn't realistic.
Structured testing
Trials measuring quantitative gait parameters, including stride length, cadence and step symmetry, with and without cueing, in participants with Parkinson's. This is what would establish whether the device is effective. Nothing so far does.
Automatic detection
Future research
This is research I'm planning, not something the device does today.
The genuinely hard problem, and the heart of the research, is distinguishing a real freezing episode from an intentional stop. A person pausing at a kerb, turning to talk to someone, or simply choosing to stand still produces sensor data that can look superficially similar to a freeze. A useful detector has to tell these situations apart reliably, because a device that cues every time its user chooses to stop would quickly become a device its user turns off.
1. Collect
Record labelled gait data from the stick's motion sensor: normal walking, freezing episodes and deliberate stops.
2. Train
Train a machine learning model to recognise the signal patterns that separate a genuine freeze from an intentional stop.
3. Respond
Trigger the right cueing automatically, in real time, even when the user cannot reach for a control.
The project is seeking research funding through Parkinson's UK and university routes.
About me
I'm a mechanical engineering graduate from Swansea, now working full-time as a data systems engineer at Ipeco, an aerospace manufacturer, where I also spent my year in industry. The Smart Walking Stick started as my final-year dissertation and continues as a Master of Research at Swansea, supervised by Eifion Jewell and Ben Morgan. It's my own project, developed outside work.
Building it has meant working across embedded firmware, custom electronics, mobile development, signal processing and human-centred design. Most of that I learned by needing it.
Get in touch
If you are a clinician, researcher, funder or part of a Parkinson's organisation, I would genuinely love to hear from you. To follow along, you can register for occasional updates.