Capturing the future: Engineering Design Day, April 27

HOBOKEN, N.J. — The ingenuity of seniors at Stevens Institute of Technology will be on display during Senior Engineering Design Day, Wednesday, April 27, 2005.

More than 60 projects, many featuring leading-edge, interactive technologies, will be viewable from 12 noon to 2 p.m. in the Canavan Arena of the Schaefer Athletic Recreational Center, one block east of 8th Street and Castle Point Terrace in Hoboken. Press attendance is welcome.

For details concerning directions and parking, please be in touch with the communications contact listed at the top of this news release.

As part of their degree fulfillment, senior student teams will demonstrate projects they have jointly engineered, often involving high-tech mechanical and electronic devices. In many cases the development process has been under way for well over a year. A number of the teams have acquired industry and corporate sponsorship to assist with project development; and in some cases, the students have won commitments from those sponsors to adapt their projects for real-world commercial applications.

From the Department of Biomedical Engineering:

“MECCo – A Novel Hand-Held Device for Identifying the Source of Muscular Pain”

“Dr. Norman Marcus, a well-known pain management physician at NYU Medical School, has been working in collaboration with Team MECCo, one of our Biomedical Engineering Teams in Senior Design,” said Dr. Helena Wisniewski, Stevens’ Vice President for Institute Technology Initiatives. “Together, they have designed and built a device to facilitate a new high-tech method for diagnosing and treating pain.”

The special electrical stimulator device was built by seniors Ryan Stellar, Jeckin Shah, and Daniel Silva, a.k.a. “Team MECCo,” for their Senior Design project in Professor Vikki Hazelwood’s biomedical engineering class. The device is patent pending.

“This is an important collaboration [with the students at Stevens],” said Dr. Marcus, “resulting in a revolutionary development in the diagnosis and treatment of pain.”

Among the displays from Electrical/Computer Engineering:

“RFID Checkout”

Sponsored in part by Texas Instruments, this project is advertised as “an efficient and reliable solution to present-day bar-coding issues.”

“The project’s focus is on tagging a store’s items with RFID tags, so that when a customer comes to a checkout, a scanner can instantly scan all the items in the cart, subtract them from inventory via a database, and produce a total due balance on the screen for the items purchased,” says senior team leader Aron Schatz. “In addition to the application of RFID technology in customer checkouts, the team has studied other RFID systems and applications in order to improve upon current faults within the technology.” Seniors Andrew Clarke, Joseph Kukis, Blair Svihra, and Rafal Szlezak round out the RFID Checkout team, which is advised by Professor Hong Man.

“Integrated Battlefield Survey and Analysis Systems”

“The focus of this project is Landmine Detection,” says senior team leader Nicole Mumma, who will receive a master’s certificate in microelectonics and photonics, along with her bachelor’s degree in computer engineering. “We incorporate a GPS and a detection system to create a tool that will allow troops to see a map of the mines on the ground, and decide whether to de-mine the field or to establish a new route. The detection system is connected to a PDA which has a GPS and has a wireless connection. The mine signatures and their GPS locations are sent wirelessly to a laptop located in the battlefield. The Laptop sends this information to a remote processing unit using satellite connection. A webpage is automatically created to display a map with the locations of the mines detected. Each time a new landmine is detected, the entire process takes place again.” Other team members include seniors Carlos Castro, Dionell Peart, Dingshi Wang, and Justin Girard, and the team’s advisor is Professor Uf Tureli.

“HeliOS - Helicopter Operating System”

“Our mission is to design a low-cost, low-power autonomous navigation system for a small, unmanned helicopter,” says senior Steven Hakusa, HeliOS team leader. “The device will be mounted underneath the helicopter carriage, enabling take-off, flight between pre-defined waypoints, and landing, all without human intervention. The system will accept small cameras and other sensor payloads, making it ideal for aerial photography and cinematography, surveillance, and disaster investigation.” Other members of the team are William Lem, Christian Pulla, and Karl Schmidt. The advisors are Professor Bruce McNair and NYU Professor Ken Perlin. The sponsors include New York University and Analog Devices, Inc.

And these are just a few of the many new student engineering and technology designs that will be on display at Stevens, April 27.

About Stevens Institute of Technology

Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.

Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.  

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