American school student creates rehabilitation aid from a soccer ball and a Raspberry Pi

Thanks to Alex over at Raspberry Pi for finding this one!

US-based eighth-grade student Amelia Day wanted to fuse her love of soccer (I know, I know, ‘football’) and her engineering skills into a project for school. So, she took a ball and filled it with sensors, LEDs, buzzers and, of course, a Raspberry Pi. Designed initially to be a soccer (umm… football) training aid, it soon became clear that it could be used for much more than that. She worked out that it could be used as a physical and mental rehabilitation aid for stroke therapy patients – the idea being that kicking the ball ‘correctly’ would build muscle memory and potentially create new neural pathways. Amelia entered the 3M Young Science Challenge 2016 competition and placed third runner-up. Take a look at the video above for more from Amelia. Such a great project from this youngster – hopefully she’ll carry on using the Pi for more inventions!

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