The Next Generation of Innovators

By Naperville Magazine
September 2025 View more Community

By Jeff Banowetz

These Naperville high school students placed at the Conrad Challenge science competition

Allen Xu, a senior at Naperville North High School, has been swimming on a team since he was 4½ years old. He’s been coaching the last four years. But in 2024 he was introduced to a visually impaired swimmer who needed some help in the water.

“It was a very moving learning experience for me,” Xu says. “I had to understand the kind of difficulties and challenges she faced on a daily basis that many other swimmers didn’t face. And something as easy as access was something that I had to learn from and kind of adapt to with our training and the way we practiced. And I knew there had to be a better way of helping her swim. Most of the problems and issues she faced in the pool weren’t because of her ability but rather access.”

He and three of his friends, also seniors this year—Kyle Wang, Aiden Xie, and Steven He—were considering coming up with a project for the Conrad Challenge Innovation Summit, one of the country’s most prestigious science competitions for high school students. “I was talking to them about this, and we realized that there were not many tools on the market that were accessible and convenient,” Xu says. “We realized that there were tools and strategies we could use in the pool to help her swim independently and safely.”

From that idea came Eyerobic, a “smart assistive” headband to help visually impaired individuals run and swim without a guide through real-time feedback using camera-based navigation and bone-conduction headphones. The team began in May 2024, and worked through the summer and fall to create the prototype for the competition. In early 2025, they submitted their work—and were named one of the 25 finalists out of more than 4,700 entries worldwide. In April, He and Xie traveled to the Space Center Houston to present the product, and it was named one of the top five entries in the cybertechnology and security category. “It was honestly one of the best experiences in my life,” Xie says. “I got to meet a lot of new people there at the summit, and everyone had really great ideas. I still think about it all the time.”

Each member took on different responsibilities for the project, but all were involved in the programming involved in making the product go from an idea to a working prototype. “The most difficult part was probably learning about computer vision,” He says. “I’ve built websites and applications for people, but you know, artificial intelligence and computer vision is something that I’ve never really dealt with before this. I had to watch a lot of YouTube videos.”

All four of them thought that the project influenced their career ambitions moving forward. “Growing up, I always liked engineering and making stuff,” He says. “I think this competition really made me think about the future, and now I like the idea of a startup and building a business with a subset of people who are just really passionate and going all in.”

Photos: Eyerobic