A team of undergraduate students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University was among the top finalists in the 2015 Texas Instruments (TI) Innovation Challenge.
The TI Innovation Challenge contest is designed to encourage engineering students to submit design projects that utilize TI technology. Justin Bishop, Nathan Parish, Shelby Turner and Rachel Vaughan, seniors in the department, created CycleFit, which placed in the top 10 out of 300 teams in the TI contest.
CycleFit is designed to allow stationary bike riders to observe their workout performance and health status in real-time so that they can make their workout more effective and efficient. The system consists of a wearable biosensor interface that measures the user’s heart rate, speed, hydration level and leg muscle efficiency, and an Android app that displays this information to the user.
The project is broken into six subsystems: the biosensor-body Interface for measuring biometric data from the user; the microcontroller processing network that converts the analog sensor data into digital signals and formats the data; wireless communications which sends the digital signals to the Android app via Bluetooth; an Android app that processes the digital signals and displays results to the user; power that provides the necessary voltages and currents for the MCU and circuit components; and a Control Board that consists of the Stellaris, the power circuits and the filter circuit for the EMG sensor data.
Their design also earned the Best Overall Capstone Award for the department in the Dwight Look College of Engineering’s project showcase and placed third in the department’s Capstone Invitational Demo Day.