My Project

At the UROP welcome night, I was able to meet a ton of new people from the program, including coordinator Beate Wassenburg and also the man I will be doing my research with, Axel Cordes. The event was in the top of the 'Super C' building, a strange piece of architecture with a massive 6th floor that overhangs the courtyard below. It was actually a really awesome place to have the meet-and-greet and dinner sessions, because it overlooked oldtown Aachen as evening was settling in. I had no idea what to expect from my project supervisor, whether he would be young, old, friendly, reserved - however, I was pleased to find an jolly and interesting man shaking my hand and saying, "I'm Axel".

During a short dinner of pizza, he gave me a quick overview of the project, "Development and Evaluation of a Multi-Channel Sensor Array for Non-Contact Monitoring". Basically, the system he is developing is a new sort of heart rate and respiration monitor that eliminates the need for electrodes being physically placed on the body. The device is being designed for use with baby incubators, and testing has already been done with some small pigs to see what kinds of vital signs could be read. The actual design is pretty awesome - basically one circuit is used to generate magnetic along known path lines, while another perpendicular receiving unit is used to read the magnetic fields. The body has a natural tendency to alter the magnetic fields with a varying degree of intensity as the heart and lungs operate. So for the first part of the my work I'm supposed to write some algorithms to take the raw data from the hardware and extract out any breathing, heartbeat, and noise from the signal.

On Wednesday I actually got to go to the biomedical technology center to check out the current system and tour the facility. The center is doing some other pretty awesome things, including the design of artificial hearts that are able to adapt to their environment to alter blood flow as the body needs it. The center also has its own facilities for circuit fabrication and also a prototyping machine that I've always wanted to work with but never had any access to in the states! So I'm definitely excited to start working in about a week and get my hands dirty. (Oh, and Axel said if I do good work then I might get my own pig to test.)