MSU Student Team Places Second In Nation At 2013 Texas Instruments Design Contest
EAST LANSING (WWJ) -- What does an electrocardiogram signal of your heart sound like?
A student team of Michigan State University electrical engineers just made it easy to find out, helping them near the top of a national design contest in the process.
The MSU design of a portable Electrocardiogram Demonstration Board placed second in the Texas Instruments Analog Design Contest, held in Dallas in July.
"It's sleek," said Mike Mock of Howell. The ECG demonstration board was created as an easy way for a person to monitor their heart rate and identify irregularities in their health. Mock, along with student electrical engineers Justin Bohr of Brighton, Nate Kesto of Milford, and Xie He, Yuan Mei and Chaoli Ang, all of China, won $7,500 for their innovation. Mock and Bohr now work for Texas Instruments in Analog Applications.
Mock said the College of Engineering team worked together on the portable ECG for months. Their challenge was to design, simulate, fabricate and test a portable demonstration board that is capable of measuring and displaying a reliable and low noise ECG signal.
"The basic idea was to create a portable demonstration board that users can interact with at trade shows and tech shows to allow them to display their actual personal ECG signal," Mock explained. "We designed an analog front end board that interfaced with a Stellaris microcontroller running an oscilloscope application."
The project was first displayed at the MSU College of Engineering Design Day last spring.
"I never thought it would be possible to walk up to a device and actually display your heart rate right on the spot so you can see if you are healthy," he added.
The team is currently being showcased by Texas Instruments in a video: http://e2e.ti.com/blogs_/b/aroundti/archive/2013/08/06/portable-ecg-takes-2nd-place-in-annual-ti-analog-design-contest.aspx
Texas Instruments sponsors the TI Analog Design Contest each year as a way to inspire engineering students and foster tomorrow's innovators. During the 2012-13 school year, 450 students from 47 accredited engineering colleges and universities participated.
The annual Engibous Summit, named after former TI chairman and CEO Thomas Engibous, included the top 10 finalist teams, which represented seven universities. These top engineering university students presented their projects to a panel of notable TI and guest judges during the three-day event in Dallas.
First place prize of $10,000 went to Rochester Institute of Technology freshman Adam Munich for an improved Tesla coil. The third place prize of $5,000 was awarded to a team from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez for an easy-tune automatic guitar tuning system. The People's Choice award and $1,000 went to a team from the University of Texas at Austin for a food safety device.
The 2014 TI Analog Design Contest, renamed TI Innovation Challenge, will open on Sept. 2, to eligible contestants in the United States, Canada and, for the first time, Mexico. Visit www.ti.com/tiic-na for more details.
Texas Instruments is a global semiconductor design and manufacturing company that develops analog ICs and embedded processors. The company has more than 100,000 customers.
More at www.ti.com.
