IEEE IKU Club KUASAR Team is a finalist in the TEKNOFEST'22 under the category of "Technology for the Benefit of Humanity" with their "K-Rod Smart Walking Stick" project, which aims to minimize the hardships experienced by visually impaired individuals in daily life and to enable these individuals to return to their social lives.

The IEEE IKU Club KUASAR Team, which is made up of students from the Faculty of Engineering and the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, considers working toward the application of science and mathematics necessary to solve the hardships as their principal concern. Continuing their work with the motto of "Engineers understand how things work and find ways of applying the practical use of scientific discoveries into the daily life", the team members with this mentality of the engineer also work to minimize the hardships that people face throughout their lives. In this context, our students, who continue their studies and their research with the awareness that disabled people face the most hardships in keeping up with the developing urban architecture, ın the later stages of their research, observed that among the disabled individuals, the visually impaired experienced the most severe problems. Our students, who observed that it is very difficult for the visually impaired individuals to continue their daily lives without help, continue their studies by taking the concern of bettering the situation of the visually impaired individuals at the center of it.

Although there are many smart canes designed for visually impaired individuals in the market, such products cannot meet the needs of visually impaired individuals due to their underdeveloped hardware and technology. Therefore, they are not widely preferred. Developed by the IEEE IKU Club KUASAR Team, the K-Rod walking stick has all the features found in existing smart canes but differs from these existing devices with its first time ever utilized artificial intelligence technology, and object identification, image processing, indoor positioning, mobile application features. Features developed by our team are vital advancements such as the location of public transit stations, the vehicles passing through that stop and the transit information of those vehicles, the current location and general transit information from the time of travel, emergency notification (notifying the 112-emergency service and the relatives of the user in the cases of falls, crashes, injuries, and disappearances). Another significant feature that distinguishes K-Rod from other existing smart canes is that it is the first to allow the user to change the feedback and distance sensitivities with sound, vibration, and audio commands, completely modifiable specific to the user's own preference, with the mobile application. One of the chief concerns of the team is to ease the usage experience with the materials used in the construction of K-Rod, which are innovatively designed.