Project

# Title Team Members TA Documents Sponsor
10 Assistive Technology for Patients with Medical Face Blindness
 Jeffrey Luan
Timothy Chia
 Yuchen He TA final_paper0.pdf
presentation0.pptx
proposal0.pdf
Prosopagnosia is a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize faces. After talking a few times with an ECE professor that has this condition, I'd like to work on developing a prototype for a minimally intrusive assist technology designed to help normalize social interactions. The basic idea is to create one piece of wearable tech that captures image data to be sent to a smartphone. The phone can handle facial recognition from a user managed database, and provide the needed information to the user. For example, an ear mounted camera with a subtle activation button might send a photo to the phone, which will identify the largest face in the image and transmit the information to the user through a second piece of wearable tech.

Building on projects FA15_30 and FA12_17, the second wearable is a wristband with a screen, with their WiFi replaced by bluetooth if we keep the phone app, the button I/O for camera activation. Battery and charging for both the camera and wristband prototypes as well. In addition, the wristband buzz once if the face is not in the database, so the user can immediately transition into introductions. A different buzz pattern would indicate that the face was identified, and the information transmitted to the screen.

On the software side, we weren't too interested in duplicating the work already done by so many other labs, and were hoping to just use API calls to any of these http://blog.rapidapi.com/2017/11/10/top-10-facial-recognition-apis-of-2017/ taking advantage of cellular networks and the cloud. This would then free us up to do the more interesting software work of creating the UI to manage the database, and give us time to work on more interesting hardware (like the second piece of wearable tech) which could be more important for this class.

Recovery-Monitoring Knee Brace

Dong Hyun Lee, Jong Yoon Lee, Dennis Ryu

Featured Project

Problem:

Thanks to modern technology, it is easy to encounter a wide variety of wearable fitness devices such as Fitbit and Apple Watch in the market. Such devices are designed for average consumers who wish to track their lifestyle by counting steps or measuring heartbeats. However, it is rare to find a product for the actual patients who require both the real-time monitoring of a wearable device and the hard protection of a brace.

Personally, one of our teammates ruptured his front knee ACL and received reconstruction surgery a few years ago. After ACL surgery, it is common to wear a knee brace for about two to three months for protection from outside impacts, fast recovery, and restriction of movement. For a patient who is situated in rehabilitation after surgery, knee protection is an imperative recovery stage, but is often overlooked. One cannot deny that such a brace is also cumbersome to put on in the first place.

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Solution:

Our group aims to make a wearable device for people who require a knee brace by adding a health monitoring system onto an existing knee brace. The fundamental purpose is to protect the knee, but by adding a monitoring system we want to provide data and a platform for both doctor and patients so they can easily check the current status/progress of the injury.

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Audience:

1) Average person with leg problems

2) Athletes with leg injuries

3) Elderly people with discomforts

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Equipment:

Temperature sensors : perhaps in the form of electrodes, they will be used to measure the temperature of the swelling of the knee, which will indicate if recovery is going smoothly.

Pressure sensors : they will be calibrated such that a certain threshold of force must be applied by the brace to the leg. A snug fit is required for the brace to fulfill its job.

EMG circuit : we plan on constructing an EMG circuit based on op-amps, resistors, and capacitors. This will be the circuit that is intended for doctors, as it will detect muscle movement.

Development board: our main board will transmit the data from each of the sensors to a mobile interface via. Bluetooth. The user will be notified when the pressure sensors are not tight enough. For our purposes, the battery on the development will suffice, and we will not need additional dry cells.

The data will be transmitted to a mobile system, where it would also remind the user to wear the brace if taken off. To make sure the brace has a secure enough fit, pressure sensors will be calibrated to determine accordingly. We want to emphasize the hardware circuits that will be supplemented onto the leg brace.

We want to emphasize on the hardware circuit portion this brace contains. We have tested the temperature and pressure resistors on a breadboard by soldering them to resistors, and confirmed they work as intended by checking with a multimeter.

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