Question: When did you start helping the elderly and disabled?

Conor McGinn answered on 10 Mar 2016:

Hey,
I started because I saw a big opportunity to do something that would help them. I was working on robots, doing stuff that I thought was fascinating and cool, and realised ‘hey, I could apply this stuff to this problem and I think it would really help’.
It probably goes deeper than that, its hard to know the exact cause of these things yno?.. It does really p*ss me off that we don’t do more to help disabled people. Like seriously, why do we keep building cities and houses with terrible disabled access – stairs are so dangerous, they cause so many accidents but we build them anyway! As far as I’m concerned we have really let down people with disabilities over the years. I saw a video a few months ago of a guy that 3d printed a prosthetic hand on a home 3d printer that was better that the one that the hospital gave him. This sort of stuff just shouldn’t happen! A big part of me hopes that the robots I’m building can really make a big difference to these people.
As far as the elderly goes, my nana had to go to a nursing home because she lived by herself and the family were afraid that is she fell, it could mean the worst. Since then its been on my mind alot that this is a fixable problem. Its a big ambition of mine to develop robots that can perform the kinds of tasks that would allow people like my nana to stay in their home for longer.