Yeigo
Helping people fit and use mobility aids safely through AR
Award-Winning AR for Mobility & Independence
Yeigo is an AR mobility tool built for Snap Spectacles that teaches users how to fit their walker to the correct height and walk with safer posture. Using hands-free, real-time guidance, it turns clinical best practices into intuitive visual cues anyone can follow. The Yeigo Hack team built the prototype in just three days at MIT Reality Hack, where it won both major tracks including the overall Gold Prize.
MIT Reality Hack
MIT Reality Hack is one of the largest and most influential XR hackathons globally - it brings together hundreds of designers, engineers, and researchers to prototype the future of spatial computing. Over an intense three-day sprint, two members of Refract Studio, Lauren Cason and Sam Jones, joined forces with Akilah Martinez, Aya Umoh, and Sade Korbieh to explore how AR could support safer, more confident mobility.
What began as a shared set of family experiences quickly became a fully working prototype. In just 72 hours, the team designed, built, and demonstrated Yeigo: a bilingual, community-rooted mobility tool leveraging smartphone sensors and Snapchat Spectacles for real-time height adjustment and posture guidance.
Yeigo went on to win both major categories of the hack: the overall Gold Prize and the Founders Lab Grand Prize.It was a special team, and a powerful validation of how meaningful innovation can emerge from clear purpose and shared experience.
The Problem
55% of walkers are set incorrectly
Most people buy a walker off a shelf and guess the height. Without guidance, the setup is often wrong, leading to strain, instability, and preventable injuries.
47,000 injuries each year
Improperly fitted mobility aids contribute to tens of thousands of ER visits annually. A small adjustment when you first start using one can prevent future falls and strains.
24% of adults over 65
Nearly a quarter of older adults rely on mobility devices, yet most receive little instruction on how to use them safely.
Our Approach
Yeigo started with our own families. Lauren had just helped her mother adjust a to a walker after an ER visit. Akilah had guided her grandmother through using a cane. Aya was recovering from posture related pain. All three experiences showed the same issue: people so often begin using mobility aids with no clear guidance.
Akilah grounded the project in community and language, giving it its name: Yeigo, which means “keep going” in Diné bizaad. Lauren shaped the clinical framing from a nursing perspective. Together, the team defined three goals from the outset: help people fit their walker to the correct height, help them walk with safer posture, and keep the experience community oriented and culturally grounded.
To achieve this, Yeigo uses a smartphone paired with Snapchat Spectacles, combining IMU data, depth sensing, and floor-plane detection. This identifies a user’s natural wrist position, draws an accurate AR height line for adjusting the walker, and triangulates posture while walking. The same sensor stack detects common risks such as leaning forward, looking down, or standing too far back from the walker, and offers gentle, bilingual cues in a nurturing narrative format.
The result is a calm, community-rooted prototype built from lived experience, giving people clearer, safer steps from the very beginning.
The Problem
55% of walkers are set incorrectly
Most people buy a walker off a shelf and guess the height. Without guidance, the setup is often wrong, leading to strain, instability, and preventable injuries.
47,000 injuries each year
Improperly fitted mobility aids contribute to tens of thousands of ER visits annually. A small adjustment when you first start using one can prevent future falls and strains.
24% of adults over 65
Nearly a quarter of older adults rely on mobility devices, yet most receive little instruction on how to use them safely.
Follow the Yeigo Story
Building Yeigo was a deeply meaningful collaboration for all of us. You can read more about the project in the Navajo Times, Forbes and the Albuquerque Journal. The Refract team, together with Akilah, Aya, and Sade, is exploring next steps, so stay tuned for more as we continue on our journey.
The Yeigo Team
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![A woman wearing glasses with circular frames, red lipstick, a white shirt with a graphic of a bear, and a plaid tie in shades of purple and blue, smiling at the camera.]()
Akilah Martinez
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![A woman with long, curly blonde hair standing on a dirt road in an open landscape with mountains in the background during sunset or sunrise.]()
Faith "Aya" Umoh
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![A smiling woman with braided hair standing in front of a brick wall.]()
Sade Korbieh
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![A young woman with shoulder-length reddish-brown hair, wearing sunglasses on her head and a sleeveless maroon top, sitting inside a vehicle.]()
Lauren Cason
Refract Studio
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![Close-up portrait of a young man with brown curly hair, light skin, and blue eyes, standing against a brown background, wearing a white T-shirt.]()
Sam Jones
Refract Studio
