6/15-19/15
1. Introductions:This week we met the ASSIST Team. ASSIST is the acronym for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Systems and Technologies. The goal is to create wearable devices that will monitor a persons vitals while harvesting energy from the body to power this function. This will allow more frequent and accurate data collection. This lends itself to the ability to study patterns regarding individual’s health and provide a better diagnosis. ASSIST is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Two devices that we worked with were the Texas Instrument Sensor Tag and the Lily Pad Arduino. Labs, data and subsequent plans were designed around the Sensor Tag and displayed in presentation media to the group.
2. Programming the Lily Pad Arduino. The growth curve is steep on this device, but I will not give up. Now that I understand the programming system of C++, I have begun to decifer the code, thanks to the help of a fellow Fellow. I am working to duplicate code from a sample source and assemble my own chain of commands. I will work more all summer until mastery is reach, so I can prepare my students for the struggles which they may face.
3. James Hunt Library Tour: Enlightening. This library was designed with the students in mind. The BookBot process can retrieve books for customer use in 5 minutes. There are so many digital devices which can be loaned out by the library for student usage (phones, cameras, IR heat sensors, printing on a 3-D Printer). Students have study group rooms for reservations, “speech steps”, computer rooms and 80-ft screens for providing depth in presentations.
4. One Health Initiative: We began reading about One Health. This is the drive behind our nanotechnology devices. One Health is founded on the interrelationship between, humans, animals and the environment. Diseases can be spread among these entities and saving any one of these factors requires that we work to save the others. We already know that zoonoses can be passed from animals to humans. All of us bear responsibilty in protecting these entities and can take steps to foster health for each group. Actions can be small such as dispensing One Health Initiative Education to implementing large scale broad and collaborative projects to make improvements that have powerful influence on the other two. I listened to an audiobook called, “Spillover” which explains how a virus is passed from horses to humans and the seach for the carrier.
5. The TI Sensor Tags: These devices are great for measuring factors such as temperature, humidity, motion, and barometric pressure by linking to your devices. (The phone worked great for us.) My colleague, Stephanie, and I struck out on a NC State Campus walk to collect temperature on varius outside objects, measuring ambient and IR temperature. Together we created a lab for our classrooms, graphed data and displayed the information in a digital format (Prezi) before presenting to other colleagues. SO MUCH FUN!!!!!
6. Field Trips: NNF/AIF/ The Clean Room “The Big Picture” is how I would summarize these tours. They answered the question, “Why do we need to know about the sensor tags ad the Arduino Boards. I am of the type of person that needs to see the big picture and this made our daily interactions with the devices that much more meaningful. The tours of circuit board construction from the ground up was a real eye opener. I appreciated how the company could take a simple idea from a client and make a functional device through proper communication, diagrams and repeated testing and modifications. The second tour was about the packaging of the devices to meet the needs of the clients. Our guide equated it to the “box” that holds the sensor; it must be functional. In both cases we met designers; some of which were college students completing internships from sophomore status and older. These projects enlisted the expertise of several different fields of engineering and health professionals..that’s collaboration. We also visited labs that contained specialized microscopes that magnified objects and even saw, get this, rows of atoms. I never thought that would be possible when I first started studying elements of the periodic table. Just wait until I share this with my students. The final lab for discussion included the preparation of plates for experimentation. And this is only WEEK 1. WOW FACTORS ALL AROUND!!!!!