Faculty and Undergraduate Student Research Database

We have several projects that deal with development and testing of biomedical instrumentation. Depending on the project, the students may participate in several related research activities: 1) Sensor design, manufacture and testing. Practical hands-on tasks that often need 3D design skills, working with plastics, resins and other materials. 2) Signal processing and pattern recognition of signals collected by our sensors. The sensors are used in the human studies and the collected data need to be processed to recognize events of interest in the sensor data. Either direction can be used as a credit in research scholars program or for conference paper preparation....

There are multiple projects that deal with interfacing of sensors to microcontrollers (MSP430, STM32). Skills in hardware and software interfacing are needed. These skills may include: microcontroller programming, PCB design, 3D design, sensor prototyping, smartphone programming, etc. Some of the projects may be taken for class credit in the research scholars program, some are paid positions. The paid positions typically are on time cards, but do not pay for time, but rather for the final result. Previous projects like this resulted in students writing papers and presenting them at various conferences. One project took the second place at student paper competition at IEEE Southeastcon, another took 3rd place (and a $5000 award) at TI Innov...

We have a number of occasional paid tasks associated with research. This is a good opportunity to develop design skills. The availability and selection of tasks varies from time time to time. Examples include: - software design: microcontroller programming, Bluetooth stack design, Java/Javascript - electronic design: sensor design, FPGA programming - 3D design: enclosure design and prototyping - manufacturing tasks, assembly - assistance with conducting human experiments and annotation of data...

I am looking for a student who is interested in learning 3D modeling, CNC machining and extrusion molding. My lab has a very nice CNC machine, Tormach 440 (see here https://www.tormach.com/pcnc-440/). I plan to utilize this CNC machine to make plastic enclosures for the small wearable sensors. First, 3D models of enclosures and molds to make these enclosures need to be designed in Fusion 360 software. Then the molds need to be machined out of wax and tested. When the molds are fully tested, we will need to machine them from aluminum. The machined molds then will be used with a plastic extrusion machine to make enclosures. This is a rather involved project but a fun learning experience for anyone interested in advanced manufacturing....