StrideSmart team wins first place for device design in Purdue’s Spark Challenge

A team of Weldon School senior design students won first place at Purdue’s Spark Challenge in December 2016. The team presented their project, “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.

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

Students in any discipline can present any project that incorporates a microcontroller. The event gives students an opportunity to collaborate on developing various projects and demonstrate their technical skills.

Photo: StrideSmart team members: Raj Patel, Chloe Beach, Anjali Malik, and Alex Baker.

TB or Not TB team wins $20K first prize for device design in NIH NIBIB Competition

A team of Weldon School senior design students who created and prototyped an economically feasible method for diagnosing tuberculosis in small children won first prize in the 2016 NIH NIBIB/VentureWell Design by Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) competition.

The team demonstrated a nickel-sized pill that collects a gastric acid sample from pediatric patients who can’t cough hard enough to provide a viable sample for diagnosis. The technology was designed for the people of South Africa, where tuberculosis is the leading cause of death. Other means of diagnosing young children are invasive, painful and distressing to children. They also cost $81 — an estimated 10 times more than the method the students invented. 

The annual DEBUT Challenge competition is funded by the NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), and VentureWell, a higher education network that cultivates ideas and inventions. All entries are designed to demonstrate a mastery of analytical and design skills and capabilities; the ability to manage the product development process; the ability to work effectively in teams; and written technical communication skills. 

Team members describe the project in this team-produced video. 

Photo: TB or Not TB team members: Amelia Adelsperger, Julia Swartzenberg, Amy Koester, Daniel Romano, and Jordan Addison.