Undergraduate Programs - Senior Projects

Car Seat Black Box
Team 15 - Michael Chen, Bill Nguyen, Sam Tang, Patrick Yen

Studies have shown that newborn infant heads are fragile and susceptible to easy deformation and abnormalities. Children’s Hospital Boston has planned a new study to determine the effects of trauma associated with car seat positional problems. A safe and easily installable monitoring system that would collect accurate data on how much time the baby spends in his/her car seat was needed.

We created a portable PCB device that would be mounted in a car seat, record the time using a Freescale HCSO8 microcontroller, and stores the time to EEPROM. The device is powered by 4 AA batteries and senses the baby using an array of micro- switches. The system will detect infants 4-6 months old and reliably transfer data via USB to a PC. The user will then be able to access the data through our GUI and save the data in a .csv format that is compatible with Microsoft Excel.