Engineering Commons^™

Using Natural Language Processing And Sentiment Analysis To Augment Traditional User-Centered Design: Development And Usability Study, Curtis L. Petersen, Ryan Halter, David Kotz, Lorie Loeb, Summer B. Cook, Dawna M. Pidgeon, Brock Christensen, John A. Batsis

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background: Sarcopenia, defined as the age-associated loss of muscle mass and strength, can be effectively mitigated through resistance-based physical activity. With compliance at approximately 40% for home-based exercise prescriptions, implementing a remote sensing system would help patients and clinicians to better understand treatment progress and increase compliance. The inclusion of end users in the development of mobile apps for remote-sensing systems can ensure that they are both user friendly and facilitate compliance. With advancements in natural language processing (NLP), there is potential for these methods to be used with data collected through the user-centered design process.

Objective: This study aims …

Bio Circuits For Evolutionary Biotech, Camilo Toruno

ENGS 86 Independent Projects (AB Students)

The field of bioengineering has much promise for renewable chemical production, bioremediation, and of course medical applications. Developing new useful microorganisms is extremely time and capital intensive, typically taking 50 million USD and eight years. This is due in large part to the low throughput techniques that are characteristic of the field of metabolic engineering. Here we describe the modification of an existing synthetic biosensor to measure the pharmaceutical dopamine, and the use of a circuit simulator Cadence to predict improvements to the biosensor. This biosensor paired with directed evolution techniques could reach throughputs of 5 million cells per day …

Social Distancing Sensor: Devices That Use Ultrasound And Radio Frequency Communication To Facilitate Social Distancing, Namya Malik

ENGS 86 Independent Projects (AB Students)

The rapid transmission of COVID-19 has caused a global health crisis. One of the primary ways to reduce the spread of the virus is to practice social distancing. Specifically, it is important to stay at least six feet away from others. However, it is difficult to implement this, and people can often forget to maintain this distance when they are in a public place.

My solution is a Social Distancing Sensor. This system consists of multiple devices that communicate with each other through both ultrasonic (US) signals and radio frequency (RF) signals. The devices are programmed with the use of …

A Convolutional Neural Network For Fast Fluence Estimation In Complex Tissues, Nicholas Blasey, Geoffrey P. Luke

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is a non-invasive diagnostic imaging technique that gives images of photoabsorbers based on their absorption of optical energy. These optical absorption properties can then be linked to important tissue properties. For the method to be quantitative, however, it is necessary to have an accurate estimation of the light fluence in the tissue. The current gold standard in addressing the fluence estimation problem, a Monte Carlo Simulation, is costly in time and computation. In this work, we developed a deep neural network to quickly and accurately estimate light fluence in arbitrary tissue types and geometries. The network was …

Engineering An Er-Targeted Dynein-Anchoring Fusion Protein To Mediate Spindle And Nuclear Positioning In Budding Yeast, Dayle Wang

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Current evidence suggests that, in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the Num1 protein binds and anchors cytoplasmic dynein to the cell cortex, where dynein generates a pulling force that aligns the mitotic spindle during mitosis; however, the exact location where Num1 anchors dynein remains unclear. In this study, I genetically engineered fusions of the dynein-anchoring CC domain of Num1 to a resident ER protein, Tcb3. Through functional microscopy-based assays, I found that the fusion protein Tcb3-CC rescues the mitotic spindle alignment defect in num1Δ yeast, indicating that the cortical ER can serve as an anchoring platform for dynein.

Investigations Of Mycelium As A Low-Carbon Building Material, Kevin Yang

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

With the building industry being responsible for 39% of global carbon emissions, there is an imperative need for low-carbon solutions that can decarbonize the built environment. This thesis aimed to address whether mycelium, the hyphal body of fungi, can be used as a building material. The first part of research involved developing a protocol for creating and testing mycelium samples. Mycelium composites were created by inoculating strains of mycelium onto agricultural substrates such as walnut shells, rice hulls, and a commercially available mix from Ecovative Design LLC. Mechanical compression and tensile tests, as well as thermal conductivity and fire resistance …

Feasibility Of Electric Field Assisted Clogging Reduction In Cold Gas Spraying Nozzle, Hendric Tronsson

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

The relatively novel cold spraying process expands its range of applications constantly. In order to continue this trend, this process still has various hurdles that need to be overcome such as clogging. Clogging within the cold gas spraying process causes porous coatings with less material properties and lower durability; a solution is needed in order to reduce the clogging and so expand the cold gas spraying applications. This study aimed to explore the feasibility of using an electric field to reduce clogging. To do so a simplified channel was used to simulate charged particle trajectory shifts under the influence of …

Cup-Net: Compressed Ultrafast Photography Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Matthew Parker

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is a cutting-edge imaging technique that uses a variation of the traditional streak camera to obtain video at 100 billion frames per second with a single exposure. In order to achieve this level of temporal detail, CUP leverages compressed sensing (CS). Compressed sensing theory states that a compressed representation of an image can be directly acquired using a non-adaptive measurement matrix so long as the encoding matrix follows certain properties such as restrictive isometry and incoherence. This compressed representation of the original scene can later be reconstructed back into the original form. CUP applies CS by …

A Low Resource Instrumentation Package For Thermal Ion Sensors, Ruth Nordhoff

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

This thesis details the redesign of a reproducible, low-resource instrumentation package for deployment on multipoint sensorcraft arrays. Distributed arrays of sensors allow for the collection of simultaneous multipoint data. This instrumentation package provides power, digitization, timing and telemetry for two suborbital auroral thermal ion sensors. This thesis addressed limitations of a previous design, including measurement synchronization, external interfaces, and customizability. Fabrication and integration procedures developed for the redesigned package were implemented throughout the fabrication of 29 devices built for NASA sounding rockets. Results are presented from the 2019 launch of Sub-Tec 8. Recommendations are made for future design iterations.

Utilizing Neural Networks And Wearables To Quantify Hip Joint Angles And Moments During Walking And Stair Ascent, Megan V. Mccabe

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Wearable sensors were leveraged to develop two methods for computing hip joint angles and moments during walking and stair ascent that are more portable than the gold standard. The Insole-Standard (I-S) approach replaced force plates with force-measuring insoles and achieved results that match the curvature of results from similar studies. Peaks in I-S kinetic results are high due to error induced by applying the ground reaction force to the talus. The Wearable-ANN (W-A) approach combines wearables with artificial neural networks to compute the same results. Compared against the I-S, the W-A approach performs well (average rRMSE = 18%, R^{2 …}

Design And Analysis Of A Piezoelectric Pulse Wave Velocity Sensor, Haley Richards, Andrew Closson, John Xj Zhang

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Pulse Wave Velocity (PWV) is strongly correlated with blood pressure and a valuable biomarker in assessing hypertension. This report evaluates the feasibility of noninvasive blood pressure determination from piezoelectric PWV measurements. A wearable piezoelectric prototype was developed to detect PWV in the radial artery, and a computational model of the sensor was designed to simulate a piezoelectric sensor response under ideal conditions. These methods provide insight into the relationship between PWV and blood pressure, and the ability of piezoelectric materials to detect blood flow characteristics. This work lays the groundwork for future device development in this field.

Sun, Sea, And Ice: Autonomous Observations Of Sea Ice Mass Balance And The Partitioning Of Solar Radiation In Arctic Sea Ice, Mary Tobin

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Three optical sensors were integrated into the Seasonal Ice Mass Balance Buoy (SIMB) 3 to autonomously measure Arctic sea ice mass balance and solar radiation partitioning simultaneously to better understand how Arctic sea ice responds to environmental forces and amplifies climate change. Two pyranometers measure incoming and reflected solar irradiance and an underwater quantum sensor measures PAR and transmitted solar radiation. The optical sensor SIMB-3 was sent to the Beaufort Sea, Alaska, for deployment. Due to complications with Covid-19 and dynamic ice conditions, the device is now scheduled for deployment in spring 2021. The results section presents data from a …