"StrideSmart" team wins Spark Challenge

A team of Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering senior design students won first place at Purdue’s Spark Challenge on Friday, December 9. The team presented their project, dubbed “StrideSmart,” a smart assistive cane attachment for the geriatric population to help monitor patient walking patterns and potentially prevent falls for users. The device would notify users of irregular walking patterns in real-time through a companion smartphone application.

The Spark Challenge is a campus-wide, corporate-sponsored design competition, hosted by the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in partnership with the ECE Student Society and General Motors.

Students in any discipline can present any project that incorporates a microcontroller to the rest of campus and corporate sponsors. The event is a chance for students to collaborate on developing various projects and show off their technical skills.

Whether a team wins or not, all teams benefit by networking with representatives from some of the leading industries in the nation.

Photo caption: Members of the "StrideSmart" team: Raj Patel, Chloe Beach, Anjali Malik, Alex Baker.