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EPSRC CDT in Sensor Technologies for a Healthy and Sustainable Future

 

MRes student Tiesheng Wang presents a Sensor Team Challenge prototype at this year's Open Technology Week.

A prototype sensor for monitoring elderly people in their own home has been presented at the 2015 Open Technology Week which runs from 26-30 July at a number of venues across Cambridge.

Open Technology Week - an opportunity for
the Sensor CDT to get involved

 

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Make-athon in Cambridge Makespace - meet likeminded people in a supportive and innovative setting.

Made within 2h: a prototype microfluidics well for biophysics experiments
Programme Manager Oliver Hadeler joined a team of physicists and engineers to look at different ways to manufacture microfluidic devices. A well with a diameter of 100µm was cut into perspex with a laser cutter and inspected using a modified Raspberry Pi camera. This process cuts out the multi-step lithography process used to make microfluidic devices in PDMS.

Future work: develop advanced microfluidic devices and make them in the Institute of Manufacturing.

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 MRes student Tiesheng Wang presented the Sensor Box to an audience of enthusopen_technology_20150726_tiesheng_1iastic engineers and scientist from academia and industry in the Department of Engineering. The Sensor Box contains sensors to monitor temperature, light level, movement and noise inside a person's home and sends the data to a server for further processing. E.g. if an elderly person normally gets up at 7am in the morning the light levels will go up. If this event is missing a smart algorithm will trigger an alarm and alert carers, family or friends.

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The sensor is developed using open source hardware such as mbed or Particle board processors. The technological challenges are to reduce power consumption while ensuring a reliable connection to the server. The students use lab spaces across the University, e.g. Engineering shown on the right.

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