After having a great time while attending the Kenan professional advancement workshop at NCCAT last week, I was ready to return to my internship at the ASSIST Center and find out more of what is expected of us as well as learn more about sensor devices. And, although it was a short week due to the holiday weekend, what a week it has been!
At the start of this week, we learned about our main internship goal: creating a device for the One Health Initiative competition! In case you do not know, One Health is an initiative that examines the interconnection of all life forms: people, animals and environment. The basis is that if something affects one area of life on the planet, it will likely affect others. Our task is to design a wearable device within those very broad parameters, along with lesson plans about One Health. We will also be creating a lesson about the engineering design process as well as one on using sensors within our curriculum.
Besides learning more about One Health and our objective, we were placed in groups of Kenan Fellows to accomplish our goal. My group consists of Nancy Cattrell, Erik Schettig, and Daniel McCoy. Much of the time this week was spent in ideation, discussing our projects and coming up with what we wanted to do. Our group decided on answering a question that is important to each of us due to our own relationship with our dogs and the importance both people and animals serve in rescue operations: How can we use sensor technologies to keep emergency personnel and rescue animals safe in emergency response scenarios?
Project ideation
During the ideation phase this week, it was discussed that there are a number of sensors that can be attached to an Arduino Lilypad (which we are using during the internship) which can monitor the environment and keep rescuers safe. We decided to focus on: temperature, light, and oxygen. For feedback to the rescuers, we decided to use a number of items including: sound, vibration, and LEDs.
We also discussed the form our device should take. We feel a pouch that can be worn by both humans and dogs alike would be useful. Because rescue dogs do not wear a collar (for fear of strangulation in confined spaces), we could either place it on a harness or perhaps design a breakaway collar held on solely by velcro. This way, the collar would not cause harm to the animal if it got hooked on something. To learn more about our ideation process, check out the following mind map:
Project Ideation Mind Map
We also learned that we had overlooked a very important design constraint when deciding what we wanted to do for our project: limited inputs on the Lilypad! This is an important item because you can only connect so many devices to the board and we had clearly gone over that limit! So…our solution: as a proof of concept, each of us would focus on a different sensor and utilize the various forms of feedback in our individual projects! We have another, updated presentation to make on Tuesday regarding our device, so we have more planning to do before then. I will reflect more on this project as it changes.
While much of the week was spend discussing our projects, it was not the only thing we did. We learned a bit more about energy harvesting and how it is accomplished from other researchers at the ASSIST Center. We got to examine three different wearables in this hands-on activity. The first item I got to examine used heat from one’s body to generate power for a wearable to access. To illustrate the process, we used one of the wearable devices they are working on and danced to music using an XBox an Kinect.
Generating thermoelectric energy
Energy harvesting at the atomic level
The second item we looked at collecting energy using a thin layer (about 100 atoms deeps!) of materials that were meticulously crafted onto a circuit board.
And the third examined our electrocardiogram (ECG) readings using a portable ECG device.
It was interesting, though I must say that some of the discussion went over my head!
On Friday, we had a remote lecture on low power electronics and communication. During this talk, we learned about a number of factors involved in powering devices without the use of plugging it in or including a traditional battery. This was followed by one of the best activities we have done at the ASSIST Center: building a set of transmitter and receiver circuit boards and using fiber optics to communicate between them! In this activity, we got to solder the components to the boards and test them out. Unfortunately, only one group managed to get voice transmission through the microphone but several of us got the tone to work. It seemed like an easy task, but making everything work together was a lot more difficult than we expected!
Soldering components on the boards
While I am feeling considerably better about our project and the course this internship is taking in terms of deliverable items at this point, I am starting to realize that there are only two weeks left to complete everything! Yes…we can do this! It’s intense…but a blast! I can’t wait for the coming week…
Completed transmitter and receiver boards