Week 29 – 4/16
This week Alex and Miranda spent a lot of time in lab fixing the noise of the signal and placing the electrodes on the body via the prototype which Miranda has been hand-sewing. Alex filled out the Design Safe analysis. Alex and Miranda also got together and wrote the Final Demo Report, this required some adjustments to the design specifications; combining some and removing others.
Week 28 – 4/9
This week Evin finished editing the poster for Sling Health’s national demo day. Miranda went to the event and presented our design, she got the contact of Sorin Vaduva who showed interest in our product.
Week 27 – 4/2
This week, Miranda and Alex spent a lot of time in the lab getting a working prototype for electrodes. After using a sweat solution to gain better adhesion, we were able to achieve an ECG on-par with what we obtained using wet electrodes. A photo of the labchart reading where we were testing is shown at the end of this. Our next goal is to lock our device to output this EKG on a range between 0-3 volts so the ADC on our microcontroller can read the signal with a proper 16-bit resolution which should allow for enough signal resolution to see a proper EKG. Within writing, we are working to finish up a poster for SlingHealth’s demo day by the 9th. We were not selected to present, but we still need to submit a poster.
Miranda also went to the wearable fashion tech lecture and got in touch with Anouk Wipprecht who is a high-tech fashion designer and innovator. She showed interest in our prototype and asked to be contacted upon completion.
Alex and Miranda also went to office hours to ask questions about the Design Safe Analysis and BME Day.
Week 26 – 3/26
This week Alex and Miranda built the initial circuit in the breadboard and decided on the specific resistors, capacitors, and op-amp components to use. We also started testing the electrodes from our client, but our signal is dominated by noise currently.
Week 25 – 3/19
This week Evin found a contact to get some conductive filament to 3D print. We don’t plan on using conductive filament, but instead the conductive thread electrodes from our client. however, this is a good back-up option.
Week 23 – 3/5
This week Alex presented the Verification and Validation report. Miranda and Alex worked in the lab to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
Week 22 – 2/26
On Monday Alex met with Mary to finish deciding what electrodes we needed to make for testing. Mary made 3 of each electrode type including: conductive foam with french knots, conductive foam with ridges, felted silver thread, felted roving, felted roving and felted roving and graphene combination, and just french knots with both 2 and 4 layer knots. On Wednesday Alex and Miranda tested the conductivity of the electrodes and built an amplifier in order to test the electrodes for an ECG next week. Alex and Miranda also wrote our Verification and Validation report this week.
Week 21 – 2/19
This week Evin and Alex met to make the presentation for Sling Health DR3 applications. Evin recorded and submitted the presentation. Miranda reached out to Mary to set another meeting to finish getting electrodes to test.
Week 20 – 2/12
On Monday we met with Mary to start working on the specific design of the electrodes and how they would be sewn into the fabric. We also measured the conductivity of different threads and chose to work with a silver thread. We also started thinking of ways to make the conductive foam have bumps in it for potentially better conductivity. Alex then met with Moran on Tuesday to discuss the overall project plan and ask for any advice on how to design the electrodes and test their conductivity accurately.
Week 19 – 2/5
This week, Miranda met with Dr. Ruppert Stroescu to finalize the plans for the ECG shirt. Dr. Ruppert-Stroescu expressed interest in Orbital Electronics’ SilverBumps electrode, so Evin reached out to Dr. Klaesner about getting in contact with Orbital Electronics. While waiting for a response, the team set up a meeting with Dr. Ruppert-Stroescu next week on Monday to begin constructing conductive thread/conductive foam electrodes. Alex and Miranda will also meet with both Dr. Ruppert-Stroescu and Dr. Moran next week on Wednesday to gain further insight into electrode design.
Week 18 – 1/29
Evin got a Pico from the Microcenter. The group met on Friday to discuss supplies and beginning building their electrodes. We need to set up a meeting with our client soon to discuss access to thread/fabric materials and instrumentation.
Week 17 – 1/22
This week, Evin wrote up a reflection and debrief on Sling Health to look at next steps for the group. The main focus of the writeup was to get a better specs sheet and determine what the specs might look like to appease a 48 hour and 30 day ICD9 billing. The plan is to hopefully have a persistent battery can can last for 48 hours, and a lot of that is about incorporating low power silicon and good power saving along with a good battery to reach this target. Because of this, Evin is planning to use a Raspberry Pi Pico due to the incredibly low power draw. Miranda and Alex looked into ordering electrodes to test with and the group plans to meet next week to start sketching prototypes and iterations. The SlingHealth target of a basic microcontroller code collecting data by the end of the month will most likely not be met unless Evin can procure a Pico this weekend, but the team agreed that this was an optimistic goal.
Week 16 – 1/15
To start the next semester, Evin presented at DR 2 for SlingHealth. Some important feedback was given, especially with regards to the business plan and competitor analysis. The scores for DR 2 were low mainly due to a lack of a proper to-market plan, which we are planning on correcting by writing up a more detailed business plan between now and DR 4. Also, Alex talked to a cardiologist over break as well as a patient who had worn a holter monitor and helped us realize that comfort is the most important differentiating fact of our device and we should work on making sure the device can be slept with. Next week, we plan to dive deeper into our DR 2 feedback and start working in the lab. We are hoping to have a basic sensing routine written by the end of the month to maximize asynchronous development.
Week 13 – 11/20
Due to Thanksgiving break, the team was out of town for most of the week and did not meet. However, we started the progress report individually.
Week 12 – 11/13
This week Miranda talked to Professor Moran about using one of his machines to measure the conductivity of the thread. She also sent the image results of the threads under a microscope that was collected last week. The conductive gel made last week solidified and we intend to measure it shortly.
This week, Evin heard from Dr. Broyles, one of the DR1 mentors about a potential innovation that could be applied to the project. Due to poor availability this week and next week due to midterms and break, the team plans to meet with Dr. Broyles/Dr. Broyles’ connection after Thanksgiving break.
Week 11 – 11/6
On Monday this week, Miranda and Alex met to take images of several conductive thread samples from Dr. Ruppert-Stroescu on the bright field microscopes in Dr. Schrieber’s lab. The goal of this research was to understand the physical structure of the threads better to determine which threads might produce less noise in an ECG signal.
On Thursday, Evin and Miranda met with Dr. Klaesner to discuss the Progress Report. Specifically, they discussed the best way to convey their unique solutions, patient data storage methods, and dry electrodes.
On Friday, Alex and Miranda met to experiment with a conductive gel recipe. They made conductive gel out of graphene powder, corn starch, and silicone caulk. They are waiting for the gel to dry to test the results.
Week 10 – 10/30
This week, Evin presented at Design Review 1 for SlingHealth. The presentation received good feedback from the reviewers. Specifically, it was noted that our current competitor analysis lacked a proper view of the entire market space. It was suggested that we include some other competitors in the space including adversarial algorithms to improve a 1-lead ECG and the Oura Ring. After looking closer, we believe that the Oura Ring isn’t a viable solution because it only measures heart rate and heart rate variability and doesn’t take an actual ECG. Going into future reports and Design Review 2, we are looking to expand this part of our analysis. We also think this will be more important for Design Review 2 when we want to compare our mock-up to existing solutions.
We also sent out multiple emails in order to start working on our solutions:
- We emailed Klaesner in order to set a meeting time so we can discuss and plan out our progress report.
- We emailed Schrieber to request access to the microscopes in Whitaker so we can image the different threads we have considered using.
- We also emailed Chamberlain to ask if anyone has access to a concentric ring probe or a different way to measure conductance over a surface area.
We have a to-do-list of things we need to start this week that include: working on ideas for the electronics housing, looking into ASTM abrasion and washability resistance, testing out the different conductive gel and snap types, and determining ideal placements of leads.
Week 9 – 10/23
This week we received our preliminary report grades back. We reviewed the comments and emailed Dr. Oyen to set up a meeting to discuss clarification on comments. Miranda also updated our lab notebook with the additional information Dr. Klaesner requested. Evin has been practicing for the Sling Health dr1 presentation and he set up a team check with Owen Zhang that we are on track. Alex started making a list of design alterations to talk to Mary about. We also sent Mary an email to set up a time to meet and discuss the next steps for the project.
Week 8 – 10/16
This week we worked more on thinking about possible iterations for our project as well
as refining our presentation. We are specifically working on refining our presentation for the
SlingHealth DR 1 presentation in two weeks.
We have yet to receive word back from our SlingHealth recruits and Dr. Stroescu was
not available to meet this week so we are planning to reschedule. With that in mind, our plan
for next week is to reach back out to SlingHealth contacts and find a meeting time with Dr.
Stroescu. We are also planning on looking over the mid-semester notebook feedback as a group which we have not had the chance to do yet.
Week 7 – 10/9
This week we set up and published our team website with information about who we are and our project. Evin also got his grade for the presentation and we reviewed the feedback to make sure we are ready for the next report and presentation. Overall, the feedback was really positive, and we are pleased! We think one or two of the comments may not have been for us because they used the names of another student presenting that day.
This upcoming week we are going to schedule a meeting with Dr. Ruppert-Stroescu to work on finalizing details of the project and possibly setting up a meeting on campus to take a closer look at her previous prototype. We are still recruiting for Sling health and will follow up with Jiabei and Deven on the business side in order to find someone to aid us with the marketing and finance aspects.
Week 6 – 10/2
This week was the preliminary presentation week so we finished the final touches on our presentation, and Evin presented on Wednesday. We got good feedback for the next presentation from Dr. Oyen. She gave valuable suggestions to the whole class such as putting references on the bottom of slides, thinking from an engineer’s mindset, using images in our presentations, staying on the title slide long enough for a proper introduction of yourself and the topic, and providing a thorough background of the problem to make the idea clear.
Presently, we are working on recruiting team members from Sling Health. Specifically, we are looking for a business consultant and an electrical engineer. We reached out to Deven Rosario and Jiabei Han, two BSBA candidates in Accounting and Finance respectively. We also reached out to Olivia Baba, a BFA candidate in Fashion Design. We have also begun thinking about our website design, and will begin to solidify this in the coming week.
Overall, we’re happy with how the preliminary presentation went, and we look forward to moving our project forward.
Week 5 – 9/25
This week, we worked a lot on formalizing our project and forming a clear vision of our project. In the beginning of the week, we met with Dr. Klaesner to talk about our initial proposal, as well as receive deeper feedback on our specifications. Dr. Klaesner suggested a few new design specifications we should consider, as well as improvements to our existing specifications. Evin also finalized our entry into SlingHealth, submitting a basic poster to problem day. On the poster, we gave a quick overview of our project’s aims and asked for an electrical engineer and a business student to join our SlingHealth team. We were unable to attend problem day due to existing commitments but submitting the poster on time allowed for Owen to print out our poster and use an additional blurb Evin sent him to advertise the project at problem day. Also doing SlingHealth, was team 7, another group working on a similarly titled “EKG Vest.” Wanting to avoid any conflicts in terms of what our teams were working on, we met to discuss our project aims and determined that team 7’s focus was largely different than ours and was mainly intended for clinical usage while ours was intended as a consumer device to be used in the home. Additionally, the other group had much less of a focus on conductive fabrics, which we are intending to be the focus of our project. Finally, we wrote the preliminary report for our project, which required us to meet on a few occasions to discuss our timeline, competitors to our device, as well as talk about what we want to deliver at the end of the project.
Week 4 – 9/18
This week, we had our first meeting with Mary Rupert-Stroescu, where we discussed the
deeper technical specifications as well as got to see an early prototype of the project that she had worked on with some previous students. We also gained some more context around the usage, with the original intention being for sleep apnea patients at night, which may or may not be a use case to look into or hold up for our product if certain design capabilities around resistance to movement become confounding. Additionally, we got to hear more of the client’s reasoning around the specs they chose as well as confirmed the validity of some specs that we estimated when writing up our project scope report. The client also further added some software features to her wish list, with the main two being support for wireless data transmission over a protocol like 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi direct or Bluetooth (with the specific implementation being up to us), as well as some sort of cloud integration for storage. No specifics around developing an app to read and present this data was requested, but in talking after the meeting this could be a good additional feature to add depending on how the project’s timeline adjusts. As for individual tasks, Evin has reached out to Owen Zhang and is filing applications to do SlingHealth, Alex has continued to look for papers on ECG, and Miranda has reached out to Engineering Test Kitchen but is pending a response. Overall, we are excited about the progress from this meeting, and additionally look forward to getting involved with SlingHealth again. (This will be Miranda’s
2nd SlingHealth team and Evin’s 3rd)
Week 3 – 9/11
This week, we had our first meeting with Professor Chamberlain, where we discussed the
technical specifications for the project. Using the content from this meeting, we formed the
technical specifications for our project scope document. We also incorporated details that
Professor Chamberlain told us about the importance of this problem to our statement. We turned in the project scope document with these details on Wednesday. Currently, we have a meeting scheduled with Mary Ruppert-Stroescu, the Sam Fox professor on Tuesday of next week where we will be talking more directly about the project because she is mainly working with the conductive fabric. Also on our to-do list is to prepare for our meeting with Mary – we are reading up on ECG specifications for medical devices. Miranda is also reaching out to Maeve Lomax and George Mitrev of Engineering Test Kitchen about our project due to her previous experience with the group. Evin is going to look at which poster competitions and startups to pursue. Evin and Miranda both have SlingHealth experience, and Evin will talk to Owen Zhang about SlingHealth. Alex will collect articles about existing ECG solutions in preparation for competitor analysis and understanding the field of portable ECG devices for discharged cardiac patients. Currently, we feel a bit unsatisfied with our projects’ progress. We have some confusion surrounding the scope assignment and why certain points were deducted. We would like to have a meeting with Dr. Klaesner to discuss these issues so that we don’t have further issues down the line and we can ensure the success of our project.