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An exploded CAD view of a mat segment displaying interior layers and LED lights
Illuminating Mat for Visually Impaired Students
Students at the Mary Cariola Center with visual impairments are attracted to light in rooms, often pulling their attention away from the teachers/lesson to look upwards at the ceiling lights. Lighted surfaces that provide contrast can help students focus on that surface and on any activity being performed on the lighted surface. The team was tasked with creating a mat suitable for children that illuminates in order to draw the student's attention downward.
Schematic of alert device in the car.
Emergency Vehicle Alert (E.V.A.)
There is a need to ensure that drivers are alerted of approaching emergency vehicles so that they can remove themselves from the path of the emergency vehicle. It is especially a challenge for deaf, hard of hearing, and distracted drivers to identify emergency signals, which puts them at an increased risk for collision. In this project, we developed a device for use in the car that detects emergency vehicles and notifies the driver of their presence. We used a trained convolutional neural network to detect sirens in noisy environments. On our validation set, we achieved a 95% detection accuracy with a 50% criterion. A demonstration of our real-time detector and design schematic are shown below.
SolidWorks prototype of intraocular lens insertion device
Cataract Surgery Device for the Developing World
Cataracts, a hardness and opacifying of the lens, is the leading cause of curable blindness worldwide, with the majority of cases occurring in developing countries where trained ophthalmologists are scarce. Our project is to develop a device to be used for a simplified cataract surgery that will insert a cylindrical intraocular lens into the cataract. By simplifying the procedure, more healthcare providers can be trained to perform the procedure, increasing the accessibility of cataract treatment in developing countries.