August 19, 2013
Building their business, a step at a time
Waterloo engineering grads join VeloCity for startup support as they develop a smart walker for seniors.
An electronic device that will help seniors get around better has given flight to a new business started by recent engineering graduates.
“We’re developing smart devices to help the aging population,” says Wilfrid Ngo, the president and co-founder of Sentry Scientific. “We have developed a walker that will help seniors live longer and healthier and it will reduce the country’s health care costs.”
It’s much more than just a walker – those user-propelled, wheeled devices that give greater stability and mobility to the physically unsteady. This walker comes with electronic sensors that will read potential dangers such as steps, curbs and broken pavement and warn the user.
Smart walkers
“Our technology makes a walker intelligent. It perceives the user’s intentions with an array of sensors,” says Ngo.
“We saw the difficulties faced by people who were using walkers, and we realized they could be dangerous,” says Ray Zhou, another co-founder and the company’s hardware designer. “We saw that there was a market for this.”
The smart walker is at least five months away from the market.
Sentry Scientific recently moved into the VeloCity Garage program, a hi-tech incubator run by the university in downtown Kitchener.
Earlier this year, Sentry Scientific won a $50,000 investment in the LaunchPad $50K competition held at Conestoga College. Support for the innovation also comes from a $60,000 Scientists and Engineers in Business fellowship. The fellowship is a University of Waterloo program supported by the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) open to promising entrepreneurs who want to commercialize their innovations and start high-tech businesses.
Ngo and Zhou accepted their engineering degrees this spring, and hold their strategy sessions in VeloCity Garage.
Co-op inspiration
A third-year work term with Titan Medical Inc. in Ancaster, which creates robotic surgery technology, was a turning point in Ngo’s life. “That’s where I got the interest in medical devices,” says Ngo, who grew up in Mississauga. “It felt possible. It felt intuitive.”
As for Zhou, who comes from Toronto, he’s just had a long-time interest in electronic sensors.
Exactly how the smart walker will work is a secret the partners aren’t quite yet ready to share, at least not until they have them out on the market.
