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Students engineer solutions to real-life problems
By David J. Craig
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For their senior project, Amanda Parish (ENG’04), Ari Konikoff (ENG’04), and Derek Walker (ENG’04) (from left) designed an innovative assisted listening device for a local woman with hearing loss. Not pictured is team member Bradley Rufleth (ENG’04). Photo by Albert L’Étoile |
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Four ENG seniors last fall were asked to design and build an assisted listening device that offered improvements over the existing devices used by people with hearing loss to receive the special sound signals transmitted by public venues such as movie theaters and concert halls.
The problem was relatively similar to those they’d tackled in electrical engineering courses, but there was a crucial difference between this project and their previous schoolwork: a local woman was interested in using the finished product. ENG Professor Mark Horenstein invited electrical engineering majors Ari Konikoff (ENG’04), Amanda Parish (ENG’04), Bradley Rufleth (ENG’04), and Derek Walker (ENG’04) to make a device to the woman’s specs, for the yearlong project completed by all graduating ENG students.
They will present their work before hundreds of scientists, engineers, students, and high-tech industry representatives at the Photonics Center on April 29. The event, which resembles a professional conference, features 10-minute presentations from individuals or small teams from ENG’s departments of electrical and computer engineering, aerospace and mechanical engineering, and biomedical engineering. Students from the department of manufacturing engineering will present their work at the Photonics Center on Monday, April 26, and Wednesday, April 28.
According to Solomon Eisenberg, an ENG associate professor of biomedical engineering and associate dean of undergraduate programs, the event prepares students for an important element of work in engineering: communicating ideas to colleagues and entrepreneurs. “The senior design project is a sort of transition into industry or graduate school,” he says. “The advocation for one’s ideas and conclusions is essential to that.”
As the culmination of the ENG bachelor’s program, however, the senior project presentations also celebrate students’ proven ability to solve real-life problems. While some students are assigned to work on a project for a paying customer, such as a local company, others, like the team that built the assisted listening device, complete a public service project or take on an essential task in a professor’s lab.
“The whole point of the senior design project is to get students working on real-life problems,” says Horenstein, who also is an ENG associate dean of graduate programs. “If they don’t finish it, somebody doesn’t get something that they need.”
After doing extensive research on assisted listening devices and analyzing the needs of their client, Konikoff, Parish, Rufleth, and Walker created a device that they say amplifies better and is easier to use than those commercially available at present. Whereas most devices literally blast sound through large, cumbersome headphones that tend to disrupt others, says Konikoff, who is hearing-impaired, his team’s device transforms a radio signal into an electronic pulse funneled directly into a hearing aid. Consisting of a pocket-sized FM receiver and two inconspicuous wires that attach to the hearing aids, it soon will be delivered to Kai Ravelson, a theater major at UMass-Amherst with moderate hearing loss.
Parish says that having to consider factors such as a design schedule and a working budget (each member of her team pitched in about $100 and solicited hardware donations) was both exciting and frustrating. “All we knew in the beginning was that we had to make something better than what was out there now,” she says. “We had to figure out what to make, and then break the project down into manageable steps and come up with a schedule. There were no hard-and-fast deadlines for when to order certain hardware or complete certain tests. We had to decide how to make the project a priority in our lives.”
Inge Tamm-Daniels (ENG’04) worked on a research project overseen by Joe Tien, an ENG biomedical engineering assistant professor, and Ken Chrobak (ENG’05), a biomedical engineering Ph.D. candidate, in developing a model of human vascular physiology. The model eventually could be used to test anti-angiogenesis drugs — those that stop the formation of new blood vessels — for treating cancer.
Using an innovative technique called photolithography, Tamm-Daniels fine-tuned an apparatus for determining the functionality of vascular cells to be introduced into a model system. “It involved lots of troubleshooting,” she says. “I tried lots of approaches before I figured out what was the best environment in which to grow vascular cells and to flow fluid over them to see how they react. Eventually I got positive results.”
Says Tien, “Her work was an important first step towards figuring out the conditions under which we can get vascular cells to be functional. She gave our project a jump start.”
For more information about ENG’s senior project presentations, visit www.bu.edu/eng, and click on the links to the individual departments.
23
April 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations