Wang Ning, 33, and his wife Huang Jinhua assembled the prototype in 48 hours at RedNote's first developer contest, held April 7-10 in the city's Zhangjiang innovation district. Their entry took first place in the hardware track and CNY50,000 (US$7,400) out of a CNY500,000 pool, tech outlet ITHome reported.
Three months later the couple demonstrated an upgraded version at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. Wang appeared on CCTV's "Focus Report" in a segment filmed there.
Wang was two days from his wedding banquet in 2020 when a scan found a tumor in his cervical spine. He told the Global Times it ran 13 centimeters long and 1.1 centimeters across and had almost filled his spinal canal.
Surgeons removed it, but the operation cost him feeling in three fingers of his right hand and left him briefly paralyzed. Walking took another three months to return.
A second tumor surfaced roughly six months later in his thoracolumbar spine, about 12.8 centimeters long and already bending his lower back, he told the paper. The operation to remove it left him unable to feel pain anywhere, a standard indicator of spinal cord damage.
