Engineering Commons^™

Diy Cell Incubator, Hayden James Jeanor

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of creating a cell Incubator is for the development of cell and tissue production in laboratory settings. Large scale research projects and the medical community grow cells for various reasons, including experiments and creating tissue for patients. However, they cannot simply depend on growing cells in a petri dish that sit on a rack at room temperature. To grow heathy cells in the fastest way possible, they use cell incubators. Cell incubators create an atmosphere within the incubation bay that is designed to promote cell growth. The three main components that need to be constantly regulated, using a …

Bicep Muscle Rep Counter With Semg, Matthew Max Garcia

Electrical Engineering

The Bicep Muscle Rep Counter with SEMG is a device that was made to develop three repetition thresholds or difficulty levels from a fully-flexed bicep brachii muscle and signal to the user when consequent bicep muscle contractions pass said thresholds or levels. This device can be used when performing a bicep-focused movement or when generally flexing the bicep muscle. Essentially, this device serves to make sure each repetition of a muscle contraction passes a percentage value calculated from the electrical activity outputted from a max contraction.

The device is not designed for and does not produce data for muscle growth, …

Smart Bottle Ble Integration, Joshua M. Rizzolo

Electrical Engineering

In 1975, four percent of children aged five to nineteen were categorized as overweight or obese. As of 2016, this figure climbed above 18 percent [1]. Researchers at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) want to investigate the effect of overeating in early childhood on later childhood obesity. This research requires collecting feeding pattern data on infants, which proves challenging. Parents cannot be relied on to regularly collect clean data due to factors including work schedule, multitasking, and general exhaustion. Thus, we have developed a tool to automatically collect data on feeding frequency and duration, as well …

Smart Motor Syringe System, Connor Wilson

Electrical Engineering

In this document a proof-of-concept design is developed and implementation to showcase the latest development in an ongoing effort to produce a series of automated syringe pumps.

Verification Of A Digital Microfluidics Platform, Karanpartap Singh

Electrical Engineering

The electrowetting effect describes the change in contact angle between a solid surface and electrolyte in response to an applied electric potential difference. Given a planar array of individually-actuated electrodes, electrowetting can be used to transport, mix, and separate picoliter to microliter-sized droplets of liquid on a dielectric layer. Applications of this phenomenon range from lab-on-a-chip and other microfluidic devices to liquid lenses capable of altering their topology and focus within milliseconds.

This project extends prior work simulating the dependence of droplet velocity on actuation voltage and demonstrates observed physics on a physical platform. The simulation portion of this project …

Portable Ventilator, Bradley C. Weeks, Jack W. Brewer, Sanders Sanabria

Electrical Engineering

The current COVID-19 pandemic has heavily impacted the healthcare system in the United States and elsewhere. The need for patients to have access to a hospital with a ventilator along with a shortage of ventilators for recovery and at-home care as a result of minimal hospital vacancy for patients has been greatly stressed. The presented problem is both an unmet demand and supply of portable and effective ventilators. Existing ventilators have many shortcomings that should be addressed: size, weight, cost, and complexity of current ventilators confines users to stay in a medical facility whilst being monitored by professionals. This both …

Smart Motor Syringe System, Conard Chan, Jenny Chiao

Electrical Engineering

Syringe pumps are widely used in many research applications especially in the applications that need precise control. Today most medical research utilizes syringes to control the fluid being pumped to the experiment objects. In most cases microscopic or nano-scopic motion control is required to acquire optimal results, such application includes purification of DNA/RNA from contaminants[1]. The high precision required to control the syringe pump makes it difficult to perform manually. This paper focuses on the design of an intelligent syringe pump motor control system to achieve reliable and precise control for biomedical experiments. This project improves medical research quality with …

Blood Glucose Predictor, Jessica Patterson

Electrical Engineering

For my senior project, I perform data analysis using statistical methods to determine body metrics that correlate with blood glucose levels. Working with Dr. Tina Smilkstein, I take repeat measurements from 6 different volunteers to establish trends in bodily metric data. The data taken includes weight, body fat, pulse rate, VO2, blood glucose, blood pressure, hours slept, and quality of sleep. Using these values, I use the program MiniTab to view results.

A few examples of correlations with blood glucose found in this project are:

• Systolic blood pressure for females had a regression line of 124.0 -0.3366*Blood Pressure. This indicates …

Portable Electrocardiogram Device And Signal Processing Design, Ryan F. Blaalid

Electrical Engineering

Full 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) measurements require inconvenient and time consuming adhesive electrode placement. This project proposes a design for a Bluetooth based ECG for remote patient measurement. The device is designed to measure up to 6-leads and utilizes 5 dry (non-adhesive) electrodes to accomplish this. The device delivers the ECG data to the user’s mobile smart phone and can then be sent to the patient’s doctor for analysis. Since the contact of the dry electrodes to the skin is not perfect, low-frequency noise called baseline wandering is introduced. A signal processing technique borrowed from image processing called morphological filtering is …

Portable 6 Lead 4 Electrode Ekg, Cody Magnuson, Wes Archbold

Electrical Engineering

This project focused on designing a small, portable, 6 lead 4 electrode electrocardiogram (EKG) machine with enough accuracy and resolution to successfully diagnose clinical issues. The electrical design used to measure signals originating from the heart can be broken up into three stages. The first stage is the human device interface. Next, is the analog block that filters out common mode noise and conditions the signal for digital encoding using instrumentation amplifiers, a right leg circuit, high pass, low pass, and an amplifier. This circuit filters all frequencies above and below the frequency band of meaningful data (1-160Hz), rejects signals …

Ecg Classification Using Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System, Jason N. Rivera, Kelsey C. Rodriguez

Electrical Engineering

ECG classification using Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), sponsored by Professor Yu, involves the diagnosis of six cardiovascular conditions by analyzing one single neural network. Today’s ECG signal instrumentation does not have the ability to characterize cardiovascular diseases without a doctor’s complete evaluation and diagnosis. Our project gives a promising solution to the inability in the current market’s ECG signal instrumentation to correctly evaluate and diagnose cardiovascular diseases. ECG signal reportings is a non-invasive process that will lead to many more applications of advanced signal processing and data analysis/diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. The inputs to the ANFIS are annotations of …

Wax Bee Gone: A Safe, Effective Solution To Ear Wax Removal, Robert G. Shenon, Shanvir S. Dhinsa

Electrical Engineering

This project sought to combine conventional methods such as scraping and water pressure to removal ear wax, but with electronic automation to removal the potential for human error as much as possible. Through the use of a 9V battery, and Arduino microcontroller, DC motors, and other circuitry, this project has developed a prototype for a device that can properly remove ear wax without any discomfort or risk to the user. Much of this project involved learning how to properly manipulate and provide the necessary power requirements DC motors from an Arduino and a 9V battery. Additionally, creating a 3D printed …

A Stroke Therapy Brace Design, Evan Kirkbride

Electrical Engineering

Victims of stroke often have difficulty with rehabilitation. With limited movement on their affected arm, patients often do not want to move much for physical therapy. In this project, we design a robotic brace that helps stroke patients move their arm more effectively in a reaching or pulling motion. By giving patients more movement in their affected arm than they would have otherwise, patients gain more from rehabilitation. The brace also adapts to the patient’s needs, providing more inclination or resistance as needed for their physical therapy. This kind of therapy engages patients rather than relying on their likely dwindled …

Exertion Control, Travis Taylor

Electrical Engineering

Current wearable fitness devices give the user after-the-fact fitness data, but little real-time feedback. Exertion Control, a new wearable device, continuously measures the user’s heart rate, creates a heart rate target, and helps the user reach it. This project completes the senior design and master’s thesis requirements and contains two milestones. The senior design product continuously measures the wearer’s heart rate and logs it with a user-friendly interface. This data models the heart’s exertion response and recovery response. The master’s thesis device refines the closed control loop with the user to give them a workout optimized to fit their needs.

Active Charge Balancing For Cardiac Stimulation, Maci Miri

Electrical Engineering

Worldwide, there are about 3 million people who have pacemakers, with 10,000 new implantations of ICD’s each month. [heart.org] Due to the gravity and importance of the function that ICD’s provide, these devices must be extremely reliable and highly effective. However, because of the high tolerances of IC manufacturing, stimulation circuits for pacemakers may be slightly unmatched and over time, may have a net DC charge applied to the tissues in the heart. Extra charge pumped into body tissues is dangerous for the patient’s health; the pH of the tissue can be raised and corrosion of the stimulating electrodes may …

Permanent Magnet Display System, Xenia Leon Rodriguez

Electrical Engineering

Pacemakers can malfunction when exposed to high magnetic fields. This becomes especially problematic for patients with pacemakers who need MRI scans as MRI machines can subject the pacemaker to damaging magnetic fields. St.Jude Medical, one of the leading biotech companies, is working to make their pacemakers MRI-safe. In order to test their MRI-safe pacemaker designs, they need an automated test apparatus that will collect and report the magnetic field the pacemaker is being exposed to. This report describes the design of such a test system that reads the Tesla intensity the pacemaker is exposed to and wirelessly transmits the data …

An Iris Authentication System Based On Artificial Neural Networks, Brenden Velu

Electrical Engineering

An iris authentication system verifies the authenticity of a person based on their iris features. The iris features are extracted through wavelet transform of the isolated iris from modified iris images. A level 5 wavelet decomposition is performed on the images, and the resulting low-frequency wavelet coefficients represent the inputs to the artificial neural network. The artificial neural network reads these features as inputs, and classifies each set of inputs according to their target identity. This authentication system currently classifies up to 10 people. The irises used for classification represent ideal situations with minimum eyelash and eyelid interference.

Large Dynamic Range Amplifier Plus Adc, Ted Hsueh

Electrical Engineering

Nerve and muscle signal sampling proves difficult because of the large difference in magnitudes. Muscle signals loom a hundred or even a thousand times bigger and can hide the nerve signals. The Large Dynamic Range Amplifier plus Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) allows one device to retrieve both muscle and nerve signal information. The device has two parts: the ability to take high-resolution data from tenths of microvolts to several millivolts and filter out environmental noise, such as 60 Hz of electrical power lines or electro galvanic signals. This gives the ability to read muscle and nerve signals using one …

St. Jude Medical - R&D Robot For Sensor Testing, Andrew Chanul Kim, Stanley Logan Laszczyk, Edgar Nava, Nathan Gall

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Laminar Flow Hood System Design, Sophie Schneider

Electrical Engineering

In 2011 health care costs for transplants were over 12 billion dollars in the United States for evaluation, procurement, facilities use, physicians, and post-transplant check-ups. In 2012 burns hospitalized 40,000 people and over 17,000 people received organ transplants. Sadly, the number of organ donors greatly lags the number of people on the transplant waiting list and the gap has widened over the decades. While preventative health care is extremely important, researching tissue engineering (TE) to treat patients in fatal condition provides alternatives for replacing or repairing a variety of damaged tissue. These alternative treatments can considerably reduce the supply-demand gap …

Energy Harvesting Of Human Kinetic Movement, David Marusiak, Julia Carrillo

Electrical Engineering

Development of kinetic energy scavenging applications from the human body necessitates additional research to assist in designating a mounting position for a potential device. A data acquisition system adequately provides a parametric average power comparison among four locations on the body (waist, upper arm, hand, and calf) for both a male and female subject. Experimentally, the hand-held device provided the highest average power. Thus, subsequent investigation at set speeds provides further analysis of the output’s characteristically linear behavior. The physical energy-harvesting device features a plastic tube casing wrapped with the stationary coiled wire through which a neodymium magnet oscillates. While …

Control System For Glucose Detector System, David Smith

Electrical Engineering

In this paper I design and test on a prove of concept level a control/timing circuit for a blood glucose detector built in a previous senior project. The specifications of the design given are to properly power the detector with a low power source. The design is completed on a transistor level basis using Cadence Virtuoso Software. The system is design from the ground up; designing, building, and testing smaller circuits first then combined into increasingly larger circuits till the completed circuit is finished. The design used to based off of the 555 Timer and uses differential pairs, CMOS designed …

An Investigation Into Ultrasonic Communication For Near-Body Networks, Eric Joshua Escudero Jr., Gursewak Singh Rai

Electrical Engineering

The following report presents a study of body-area, free-space ultrasonic communication system. Two analog communication systems are investigated. The initial communications system setup relies upon the amplitude modulation (AM) techniques to transmit the signal. Such a system is prone to noise since the amplitude of the signal is directly affected by distance and the signal strength will deteriorate. The secondary communication system involves utilizing frequency modulation (FM). This method avoids the issue of losing information due to amplitude deterioration, but encounters delay issues. The main hardware components used in the approach outlined include ultrasonic transducers (UTs) used for both transmitting …

Heart-Rate Monitoring Control System Using Photoplethysmography (Ppg), Wesley Nguyen, Ryan Horjus

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Rfid Techniques For Passive Electronics, Ryan Behr, David Cobos

Electrical Engineering

No abstract provided.

Circular Polarized Splatch Antenna, Cynthia Truong

Electrical Engineering

The Splatch Antenna combines excellent performance and cost-effectiveness into an antenna package that can be integrated. The goal of this project is to figure out how to connect two Splatch antennas to realize a Circular Polarized (CP) antenna. The advantage of CP versus linear polarization is that CP eliminates polarization mismatch losses caused by Faraday’s rotation.