Senior Design Projects

Team Name: Args N’ Kwargs
Team Sponsor: Dr. Elton Graugnard
Team Members: Michael Cleverdon, Nick Stolarow, Ian Whitney

Many BSU faculty and departments have equipment for making, processing, and characterizing materials but this equipment is not known to the wider community. Currently, a group attempts to catalog this information so that it can be distributed for wider use. The approach being taken is to use a spreadsheet and manually manage the data. This is a very time consuming process. The proposal is to create a database with a web interface that can be used to manage and access the data.

Team Name: NA
Project Name: Computer Vision-based LIDAR Data Processing for Autonomous Driving
Team Sponsor: Dr. Yang Lu
Team Members: Andre Maldonado, Andre Murphy, Nicholas Ravenna

For this iteration of the project, we will be creating a software package that takes the LiDAR point cloud information and uses the data to detect objects. The previous team converted all of the point cloud data into MATLAB format, which we will evaluate and determine if we will use. The goal is to have the Livox Horizon data use machine learning to detect objects. Ideally the objects would be other cars, the road, trees, people, etc.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: Bravo Six
Project Name: College as an Investment Calculator
Team Sponsor: Dr. Luke Jones
Team Members: Michael Kinsy, John Koenig, Sajia Zafreen

This project is to build out a web-app version of the currently existing “College as an Investment Calculator” with additional functionality. The UX design and layout must be achieved with additional functionality such as being able to create a log in, save information, calculate loan length terms, interest rates, and amounts, produce a PDF report, and let students run and save multiple versions of their college investment scenarios that are expected to be accomplished in this project. The hope is that this app can be adopted by multiple AVID high school classes as a formal part of their curriculum and perhaps be used and tested with current Boise State students.

We hope to accomplish these goals by introducing a backend environment to maintain user data. By creating/extending functionality to interface the application with this user data (i.e log-in, save info), we hope to further enhance the front-end user experience.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: FAMADA
Project Name: Faculty Adjunct Management Application
Team Sponsor: Li Sperl
Team Members: Austen Hale, Bethany Hull, Jalen Nall, Justin Raver

The School of Public Service is currently managing adjunct faculty records through several manually controlled spreadsheets. Data in the spreadsheets is utilized for several purposes including: tracking faculty I-9 status and salary, archiving previous adjunct professors, managing the courses taught by each faculty member, and scheduling future courses. Currently the spreadsheets are visually scanned during each search to produce a list of results. This approach is inefficient, tedious, and does not scale well. A
custom software application comprising a database and a user interface would greatly improve on the current approach, and allow users to easily manage faculty records instead of having to manually look through several spreadsheets. This application will reduce the difficulty of searching, updating, adding to and maintaining the current data.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: Pyion
Project Name: Measuring Selectivity of Lysenin Channels
Team Sponsor: Dr. Daniel Fologea
Team Members: Zixiao Chen, Monte Hedrick, Donovan Wright

The current software used to record measurements of transmembrane voltage provides three IVplots, and experimental data in a table, but does not provide a plot or data for the average of the three measurements. Using the experimental data our team will provide a program that calculates and combines information into a table and produces plots that are not made by the original custom program in current use. These new plots will be used for measuring selectivity of lysenin channels.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: Quetzelcoatls
Project Name: Step Counting Membrane Stretcher
Team Sponsor: Dr. Daniel Fologea
Team Members: Kelton Christopher, Parker Erway, Adrianna Mickel

A membrane stretcher is controlled by two Python scripts running on a Raspberry Pi. Each script takes a command line input to specify the number of steps forward or backwards. The process of running each script is tedious for the end user and does not provide useful historical data. This project will focus on engineering a user friendly interface that combines the functionality of both scripts and implements a logger to track previous inputs.

A micrometer reads the true displacement and outputs the values through a serial protocol. Currently the user must read the micrometer values manually. The stretch goal for this project is to integrate the micrometer measurements with the existing Python program so that data from the micrometer is displayed in real time in the GUI.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: Ramen
Project Name: EMA Survey App
Team Sponsor: Dr. Cindy McCrea
Team Members: Paisley Davis, Mason Humphreys, Chloe Johnson

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is a data collection approach which requires participants to answer very brief surveys at specific moments in their daily lives. The goal of this project is to create a mobile app that will make the survey collection process easier and more efficient for both researchers and participants. The completed app will act as an interface between surveys hosted on Qualtrics and participants’ smartphones to facilitate the collection of EMA data while providing customization options for both parties, such as researcher-scheduled reminders, notification muting, and a visual streak system that provides psychological rewards for completing surveys. In this way, we hope to improve the survey-taking process, both increasing participants’ satisfaction with it and the quantity and quality of the data collected.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: Baby Watchers
Team Sponsor: Dr. Erin Mannen
Team Members: Colten Davis, Saxon McFarland, Aiden Nelson

The Boise Applied Biomechanics of Infants (BABI) Lab studies how babies move to understand healthy development and safety in commercial baby gear. Rolling is an important milestone that signals healthy development when achieved on time. Previous research has identified six ways that infants move based on qualitative metrics of a few babies, but little has been done to quantitatively understand how babies coordinate their movements to achieve this task. Understanding the complexities of rolling not only has implications for early intervention if babies do not reach the milestone (i.e. physical therapy), but it can also help inform safe infant product design.

State of the art motion capture technology was used to track the precise segmental movement of ~30 babies in order to begin quantifying roll types. Also, video footage was captured of ~30 babies during testing in our lab. If we can find a way to use video to track segmental movements of babies, we have a way to obtain a much larger data set of video only to more robustly quantify how babies achieve a roll. The first part of the project is to develop a method of segmental tracking via video, and compare it to the state-of-the-art motion capture data. Once the video analysis technique is completed, a stretch goal (or future goal) will be to use machine learning to categorize the videos of babies rolling into one of the six distinct roll types.

Team Name: Micron
Team Sponsor: Micron
Team Members: Jeff Allen, Jackson Edwards, Nick Prussen, James Reeping

Micron does not have a centralized method of onboarding new hires. Given how many working parts are involved in the hiring/onboarding process at Micron, it would simplify the onboarding process and make it easier for all parties involved if there were a one-stop solution. That’s where we come in. Our task is to build a modular base application to address Micron’s onboarding problem. Our app needs to allow new hires to stay in touch with supervisors, give them a better understanding of what is expected of them, Introduce Micron policies and track their onboarding journey. Our solution will be a modular one, split by type of hire, i.e. Intern, internal transfer, Supervisor, etc… With this modularity, the app can then be easily expanded on by future developers to include new roles.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: Angels of Mercy
Project Name: Boise State University Inpatient Nurse Staffing Simulator
Team Sponsor: Dr. Rene Walters
Team Members: Lih Wei Liang, Emma Lytle, Becka Seevers

The goal of this project is to create an interactive interface that will simulate components of an operational budget in the hospital. Specifically, this phase of the project will be focused on the nurse staffing element of the operational budget. The interface will consider the number of patients that need treatment, level of acuity (ICU, Med/Surg/Rehab/ER), and type of staff needed to care for the patient. Students will enter in the provided input options in the user interface based off of a given scenario and they will see how their budget is affected by the staffing choices they make. This is to provide nursing students with a way to practice staffing budgets.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: WeLoLo
Sponsor: Malcom Brown
Team Members: Xavier Frehner, Zahra Rahmani, Alyssa West

Welolo is a platform for local businesses that allows their customers to pay it forward. It allows for gifting products and services to friends, family, and strangers to draw new customers and increase business. In its current state, a user is able to pay with a credit or debit card using Square to pay it forward. However, in the interest of ease of use for the user, Welolo is looking to expand their payment options and implement a system to notify those who have been gifted money.

Welolo currently has no way to notify the recipients of the items paid forward to them and have no other options for payment that may be more convenient to the user. For this project, we will create a checkout process in a sandboxed environment that can send details of the items, including the location, as a notification to the recipients, so the Welolo app helps the recipients to understand what items have been prepaid for them to get them from the store. We will also provide another payment option to help make things more convenient for users who would like to pay it forward to another individual or group.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: Data Catchers
Sponsor: Dr. Vanessa Fry
Team Members: Wyatt Cupp, Nick Deighton, Cade Peterson

CATCH is a non-profit organization in the Treasure Valley whose sole purpose is to find housing options for families experiencing hardships during the housing crisis. CATCH works with local businesses, congregations, and government to receive donations to make their goals a possibility. With the data CATCH has already gathered over the last 10 years, they would like to be able to come
up with a system to provide more in-depth analysis of the data they have collected. This analysis will primarily be focused on understanding which constituencies are being represented, ensuring this is equal across all categories, and making program changes based on the feedback received from the analysis.

Since CATCH is mostly concerned with the categories of constituencies they are serving, the data will need to be analyzed and categorized to provide what categories are being underserved. The results of the analysis will be critical in the development of their services, so the information will need to be presented in a manner that is clear and concise. Additionally, to get the data to a point in which we can even examine it we need to ensure we clean all the data to ensure missing, mistyped, or corrupted data can also be examined.

You can watch the project presentation here.

Team Name: Virtual City
Project Name: Virtual City Web Controller
Team Sponsor: Dr. Ed Vasko
Team Members: Sam Acker, Jacob Uzabel, Brielle Young

The goal of this project is to build a web interface which allows researchers and faculty to login, configure, and run scenarios within the Institute for Pervasive Cybersecurity virtual city.

You can view the presentation here.