Project Goal: Create and integrate an automated management system to support a greater production volume.

Ruda-Cardinal Inc. is increasing their mass production of custom optics projects. To handle this growing demand, they wanted to replace their manual system with a new automated process.

The Manufacturing Resource Planning system is primarily cloud-based, logging components of a product with process controls that prevent human error. Users can track serializations, locations and overall status of a product throughout its lifecycle. Scanning and manual functions update the information. An encoded template for each manufactured product creates documents that are curated to record product status, location and other necessary information.

Scanning technology tags inventory and its transportation hardware with unique barcodes. Items are cataloged by barcode or manual entry. A custom SharePoint site stores all relevant inventory and contractual data for each product and allows intercommunication through shared updates regarding product status.

Project Goal: Develop a portable, non-invasive skin-imaging system that captures at least 250 frames per second to observe physiological processes in a time frame varying from a few seconds to one minute.

The market lacks products that can track biomarkers, such as hemoglobin, hemosiderin and bilirubin, over long periods of time. Such a product will assist in biomedical research on skin-level processes and may lend itself to improving patient care if integrated into medical devices for non-invasive imaging of the skin.

The Rapid Optical Imaging of Low Frequency Physiologic Processes observes physiological processes that occur between one second and one minute, using 13 types of LEDs to illuminate tissue with specific wavelengths chosen to target particular biomarkers. A custom electronic design operates the LED array. A heat sink dissipates the heat from the power generated by the electronic system and safely prevents thermal damage. The ROIPP rapidly cycles through the 13 biomarker wavelengths, displays a live video feed and efficiently saves the images onto the user's computer.

With this device, the concentration and movement of multiple biomarkers within the human skin can be recorded simultaneously, allowing researchers to recognize patterns in activity.

Project Goal: Design a system that detects heart, breath and speech through sound, which is analyzed using natural language processing technology to aid doctors in diagnosing patients.

Subtle Sounds is a holistic system that takes in arbitrary sound data and computationally analyzes the signals with a natural language processing, or NLP, interface.

An electronic stethoscope collects heart and breath sound signals, and it transmits data to a computer via Bluetooth. Four large diaphragm cardioid condenser microphones, mounted on individual tripods strategically positioned to surround the patient, capture speech sound signals. Parselmouth, a Python library for Praat software, determines the acoustic properties of input signals, including harmonic-to-noise ratio, jitter, shimmer, short-time energy, energy entropy and zero-crossing rate. The software also creates reports that depict relevant data and tables that are useful for a doctor's diagnosis. The software-generated reports are saved in a small on-board database.

Newly written software compatible with Google's API NLP provides transcription of the patient consultation. The software runs on a PC mounted on a mobile cart. The cart also holds the microphones, mounts, cables and stethoscope when the system is disassembled. A doctor or medical professional can easily transport the system and set it up in five minutes or less.

Project Goal: Develop an image analysis tool to assist in the qualitative analysis of platelets and platelet activation.

Improvements in qualitative analysis of medical images, platelets in particular, are needed to reduce overhead and remove human bias, error and inefficiency.

Fractal Eyes V2.0 serves as a preliminary, neural-network-based platform that classifies platelets in different stages of activation, while it also extracts feature data for further analysis. Developed in Python, the tool captures the area of the platelet, the perimeter, color density differences, light intensity and approximate pixel length and width as it maps the image. A graphical user interface application loads platelet images, view feature data and access log data for image analysis and feature extraction subsystems.

This system will aid the University of Arizona Center for Accelerated Biomedical Innovation's current work on platelets and associated technologies, programs and goals. It serves as foundational work for expansion to other subjects of medical image analysis.

Project Goal: Improve the performance of current low-cost ventilators by designing a mechanical ventilator from readily available materials and implementing an advanced control system to adjust and monitor clinical data.

Healthcare professionals and medical facilities are overrun with an increasing number of COVID-19 patients who needed sophisticated, extremely costly mechanical ventilators. Makeshift, low-cost ventilators designed by engineers around the world did not meet the demand due to expense and the short supply of medical-grade components.

This design mitigates those issues by using everyday household materials, such as a ball for an air reservoir and a rolling toolbox as a mode of portability. An advanced control system monitors air flow and pressure to the patient during the breathing cycle, which can be read on the graphical display. The ventilator also features a two-arm design that operates as the squeezing mechanism to deliver air to the patient. A motor and a set of adjustable clinical parameters control the device.

Project Goal: Develop a point-of-care system for portable, cost-effective and rapid platelet separation and concentration for analytic and preparative purposes.

ThromboSpiral is a portable and rapid microfluidic system for platelet separation and concentration in a clinical setting. It provides point-of-care analysis of platelet health in patients at risk of blood clots due to cardiac devices.

The system consists of three distinct modules. The first component separates platelets from whole blood using a compact centrifuge constructed from a disk drive, 3D-printed rotor and siphoning cap. The siphoning cap automatically removes the separated platelet-rich plasma from the other blood components and deposits it into 10mL chromatography columns for the gel filtration of platelets.

Once separated, the platelets are passed through shear-simulating microfluidic channels, which activate the platelets within predefined ranges of shear to simulate conditions found in common cardiac devices. Finally, these activated platelets pass through a second microfluidic chip that immobilizes fluorescently tagged platelets to be identified using a custom fluorescence detection device.

Project Goal: Incorporate an automated media exchange system into a tissue engineering bioreactor for longer experiments and contamination detection.

A university bioreactor built in 2019 for complex cartilage tissue engineering worked efficiently and effectively to deliver the needed mechanical loading to engineered cartilage cells, simulating the physiological conditions of the human body. However, the overall design to reproduce the loads from humans’ natural gait onto stem cell-seeded scaffolds compromised the sterility of the growth environment, since the user had to open the bioreactor every time cell feeding needed to occur.

This new media exchange system automatically switches media within the enclosed bioreactor, removing the old medium and depositing a fresh medium in a sterile and closed reactor environment at user-dictated intervals. An added photodiode-based pH monitor, in conjunction with phenol red in the medium, detects contamination in real time.

Project Goal: Design and build a cloud-based medical efficiency system that alerts users to upcoming operating room turnover tasks.

Preparation time is valuable in a hospital operating room, or OR, but communication and coordination issues between personnel can lead to unplanned downtime between patient procedures.

This mobile application notification system, built with Flutter, Svelte and Firebase, incorporates real-time user feedback to improve the organization of OR turnover. A cloud-based server communicates with mobile and desktop browser applications to assign tasks, deliver notifications and update the overall room status. Staff members receive assignments through their mobile application, while the desktop browser application determines the work required for a given OR turnover workflow. Real-time updates of task completion status are used to coordinate the deployment of notifications.

The system centralizes the structure to initiate, track and complete OR turnover tasks

Project Goal: Develop a cost effective, rugged and simplified antenna mounting design that allows for unhindered driver visibility and uninterrupted GPS signal acquisition and data transfer.

Caterpillar sought to modify the current GPS antenna mounting system on its autonomous trucks and move it from the chassis to the dump body. This would maximize satellites’ visibility, minimize positional error, maintain optimal signal quality, protect electronics, and ease servicing.

This design provides a new auto leveling system that ensures the GPS antennas stay parallel to the horizon when the dump body is in motion. It also improves driver visibility by eliminating obstructions and provides easy access to facilitate maintenance.

The design eliminates the currently inconvenient mounting location while allowing for increased productivity and safety during mining operations.

Project Goal: Design a way to move, dispense and reel in conveyor belt material used to protect concrete pads around the Caterpillar facility.

There are many concrete surfaces at the Caterpillar Tucson Proving Ground that crack easily when heavy machinery moves on them, leading to expensive maintenance costs. Currently, Caterpillar mechanics use a forklift to lay thick and heavy mining conveyor belts on top of the concrete surfaces to protect them. It is a time-consuming process that puts mechanics at risk of injuries.

The team’s spooler design provides a safer and more efficient method to lay down and move conveyor belts around the facility, while also improving belt storage.

The design uses a spool that can be connected and disconnected from the spooler and the conveyor belt. The spool is connected to two wheels that rotate when a forklift pushes the spooler forward. As the wheels rotate, the conveyor belt is rolled up on the spool. Since the conveyor belt remains on the spool, it can be moved around safely and easily.