Design kitchen teams
cook up winning ideas

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF
REPORTS

It’s been a great month for recent Rice engineering alumni who entered
senior design projects into high-profile competitions.

	Team Dexter, from left: Rachel Jackson, Allison Scully, Dillon Eng, Jessica Scully and Avery Cate.
	TEAM EQUILIBERATORS
	TEAM STRIKEOUT

Team Dexter and Team Equiliberators won top honors for separate
projects that help rehabilitate young patients, primarily those with cerebral
palsy.

Maria Oden, director of Rice’s Oshman
Engineering Design Kitchen and a professor in the practice of engineering
education, and Marcia O’Malley, an associate professor of mechanical
engineering, advised the students in collaboration with Shriners Hospital for Children
in Houston.

Team Equiliberators — bioengineering graduates Drew Berger and
mechanical engineering graduates Matt Jones and Michelle Pyle — was selected
as one of the top five finalists (the highest level of recognition) in the Student
Design Competition sponsored by the Rehabilitation Engineering and
Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA). Oden, O’Malley and
doctors at Shriners worked with the team to develop a balance-therapy system
for cerebral palsy patients that uses Nintendo Wii boards along with innovative
force transducers that measure both center of balance and a patient’s use of
handrails to remain upright. The competition was held June 5-8 in Toronto.

Team Dexter —
bioengineering graduates Allison Scully and Jessica Scully and mechanical
engineering graduates Avery Cate, Dillon Eng and Rachel Jackson — took the
grand prize in the Undergraduate
Design Project Competition in Rehabilitation and Assistive Devices at the
ASME Bioengineering Conference in Farmington, Pa., June 22-25. The team
developed an electronic pegboard to track three-dimensional hand motion; the
device helps clinicians assess gains in the dexterity of cerebral palsy
patients.

A third Rice group, Team Strikeout, has been named a finalist in the Global National
Instruments LabVIEW Student Design Competition Aug. 1-4 in Austin. The team advised by Gary Woods, a
Rice professor in the practice of computer technology, designed a prototype
called PitchPALS
(Pitch Pressure Analysis & Logging System), a replica baseball with
pressure sensors that record the exact pressure and position of a pitcher’s
hand when delivering a pitch. Team members are electrical engineering graduates
Sharon Du, Ashley Herron and Qian Zhang and mechanical engineering graduates
Peter Hoagland and Jennifer Sullivan.