A student-founded Chinese startup building an LED-lit smart trekking pole with GPS positioning and one-tap SOS rescue for scenic-area hikers.
The Changtuo Smart Trekking Pole is a telescopic aluminium hiking pole with a built-in LED lamp, a Bluetooth speaker, a detachable selfie mount and app-linked GPS/BeiDou positioning in the handle. It targets night hikers, casual tourists and park operators who want safety and convenience in one stick instead of carrying a pole, a speaker, a selfie stick and a torch separately. The problem it solves is trail safety: pressing the SOS button five times relays a sub-0.3-metre location to park staff, who can dispatch a drone that drops a first-aid pack in as little as 3 minutes 44 seconds. It reaches customers mainly through smart rental cabinets in national parks on a try-then-buy basis, at RMB 3 per hour to rent or RMB 98 to keep. Its edge is the software and rescue integration, not hardware alone. It is built by a lean 18-person student-founded team, holds 19 patents and software copyrights, and carries national-standard safety certification.
Founder Liu Baonan earned his first RMB 30,000 running campus stalls during COVID, then registered Hunan Changtuo Intelligent Technology in 2018 and began the trekking-pole project as a university competition entry. As a hiking enthusiast fed up with carrying a selfie stick, speaker and pole, he set out to fold them into one device. The first prototype weighed 400 grams and was dismissed by scenic areas as a 'gimmick' and by consumers who said a phone was already enough. After interviewing hikers and park staff on Wugong and Yuelu mountains, the team refocused the product on safety, adding BeiDou/GPS positioning accurate to under 0.3 metres and a five-tap SOS linked to drone rescue. In 2023 the firm was certified as a national high-tech enterprise, and in 2024 Liu returned to Hunan Normal University for a master's in mechanical engineering to develop lighter carbon-fibre materials. A near-drowning in a dark cave, where his own pole's SOS led teammates to rescue him, hardened the product's life-saving mission. Today the pole is deployed in several 5A scenic areas including Wugong, Mingyue and Yuelu mountains, and in October 2025 the company closed an A-round from a Hunan student-entrepreneurship fund. It now runs a 'rent for RMB 3/hour, buy for RMB 98' model that pushed peak single-day revenue above RMB 20,000 and annual revenue past RMB 1 million, with the team still only 18 people.
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