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The growing market for sports analytics has spurred more interest than ever in quantifying athletic performance. This trend, alongside the proliferation of new wearable technologies, has expanded the possibilities for both professional and amateur athletes to instrument themselves and collect meaningful data. The reactive strength index (RSI) can be used to communicate this kind of data by presenting a person’s ability for rapid movement. A user study was conducted in which young adults of amateur athletic status performed a jumping exercise to assess the feasibility of using a commercial off-the-shelf inertial measurement unit (IMU) to measure this metric compared to the usual method of using a force plate. Results suggest that the measurement of meaningful RSI improvements is possible using inexpensive IMUs with comparable results to costly force plates.

This paper describes a toolkit for analyzing changes in algae levels in bodies of water as an indicator of eutrophication. Eutrophication is caused by the excessive nutrient loading in a lake or other body of water, frequently due to fertilizer runoff. The enriched water can cause dense growth of plant life (e.g. algae blooms) in the water. When this growth dies, the bacteria associated with decomposition consumes oxygen from the water, which can create a hypoxic environment (i.e. insufficient oxygen to sustain life). Not only is this an environmental problem, but also an economic problem. The estimated cost of damage mediated by eutrophication in the U.S. alone is approximately $2.2 billion annually. These costs come from a variety of factors: parks losing revenue from forced closure, clean up, and removal of algae. The key components of the system discussed in this paper are a drone, multispectral camera, and a spatial and temporal analysis software toolkit. The multispectral camera stores images on a removable SD card that are then imported into ArcGIS. Analysis is done through a custom Python toolkit created to determine vegetation health levels in bodies of water. The key focus of analysis is using the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values captured from multispectral imaging to compare the different vegetation levels across various flight days. This system can help users combat eutrophication by allowing them to identify patterns and trends in the algal growth in bodies of water they manage in near real time. This may help, for example, identify patterns in fertilization and algal growth, and ultimately aid in keeping bodies of water healthy.

The vast outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020 precipitated many changes worldwide, including the sudden shift to online and remote learning across institutions of higher education in the United States. Those sudden shifts yielded ill-prepared remote learning experiences - dubbed pandemic teaching - that contributed to a growing fear of a drastic reduction in student enrollment in the forthcoming 2020–2021 academic year if the quality of remote engagement did not substantially improve. Institutions worldwide rapidly pivoted and sought to explore new means of effectively engaging their student populations, including incoming students, to shore up retention and matriculation in the face of a new and persisting remote learning environment. The authors of this study created a new virtual summer bridge program, named 24for24, to shore up their institution's engagement with its students. 24for24 was targeted at the incoming class of 2024 engineering majors at a primarily undergraduate institution in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The summer bridge program was intentionally designed to generate excitement for the engineering major and to promote early community-building, which defines our paper's two objectives, as a means of shoring up matriculation and provide the authors a metaphorical sandbox to explore online pedagogical practices emphasizing student engagement. The quality of the program's two objectives was assessed using aggregated survey results and through qualitative observations of the matriculated cohort at the start of the 2020–2021 academic year. The authors found no measurable change in excitement for the major, yet the authors found that the summer bridge program fostered a small community made up of about 30 students who actively participated throughout the 8-week long program and continued to engage intimately with each other in the first-year engineering course at the start of the new academic year. The authors discuss perceived benefits and shortcomings of the program and speculate on means of strengthening it in a post-COVID-19 era where the threat of reduced student enrollment is ever-present due to demographic changes in the United States. The authors' inaugural execution of 24for24 revealed that there is value in engaging with students in a virtual summer bridge program remotely as a cost-efficient means of fostering enthusiasm for engineering studies, fostering a sense of belonging through community-building, and priming student mindset for success.

This complete evidence-based practice paper describes a methodology used in a general first-year engineering program to explore students’ perceptions of engineering through the use of drawings. One of the primary objectives of the first-year program is to help students develop a sense of identity within the field of engineering, as well as, understand basic engineering knowledge and skills, which in turn will support them in their selection of an engineering major (among 15 different options) and ultimately in their persistence toward their selected degree. Hence, understanding students’ preconceptions of the engineering discipline when they start their academic program is crucial. However, many students entering the program come with narrow preconceptions or limited knowledge about the profession. One challenge instructors face is how to facilitate students’ thinking about their own perceptions of engineering in a meaningful way. A typical activity to help the students understand their perceptions of the engineering discipline is to ask them “What is engineering?” However, instructors have been frustrated by the lack of depth in students’ responses. This paper explores a different methodology to explore students’ perceptions of the engineering discipline by taking an arts-informed approach; instead of writing down their perceptions or talking with a peer, students are first asked to draw the response to the question “What is engineering?” Approximately 150 students participated in this activity during the first class at the beginning of their first semester in engineering (Fall 2018), across 6 sections of the first in a two sequence, foundations of engineering course, taught by two instructors.Our work was informed by the theoretical framework developed by Capobianco et al. (2011). They used the Draw An Engineer Test (DAET) to identify how elementary school students perceived an engineer. In their work, they were able to identify the actions performed by an engineer, and the artifacts used by an engineer from the students’ perspectives. They were also able to categorize an engineer into 4 different groups: (1) mechanic, (2) laborer, (3) technician, (4) designer. Although this work has been used previously in engineering education research and provides insightful data on kids’ perceptions of an engineer, we are taking a different approach. We are interested in understanding not the perceptions about the person (i.e. the engineer), but about the discipline. Hence, we used Capobianco et al. (2011) work to inform our approach to data collection and analysis.This paper presents preliminary results on the analysis of the students’ perceptions of the engineering discipline through art-based techniques using a visual methods qualitative approach. It has been suggested that these types of approaches can facilitate more meaningful conversations between instructors and students regarding their previous preconceptions of disciplines. We used these methods to investigate students’ drawings to observe how they organized their thoughts and chose to represent their views. Data were analyzed using open coding of the draws and the analysis was conducted by 3 different researchers. The researchers agreed on an initial codebook. Some descriptive statistics are presented to understand the different aspects highlighted by the students in their draws.Anticipated results provide an insightful representation of undergraduate engineering students preconceptions about the discipline in terms of the context in which they believe engineering happens, the typical work performed in the discipline, the tools and artifacts used in the discipline, the types of problems the discipline solves, and the scope of the field. We provide implications for research and practice and recommendations on how first-year engineering instructors can use this information to better understand their own students' preconceptions about engineering to help them develop a complete and critical understanding of what engineering is.

This paper describes a system for collecting and analyzing multispectral imagery to evaluate crop health and streamline vineyard management in small to medium-sized vineyards. The system consists of three main components: a sensor assembly with a multispectral camera, quadcopter with flight automation, and a web-based decision support information system for analyzing multispectral imagery. Multispectral imagery can provide a holistic view of crop health through the use of different indices. A widely used index is the Normalized Difference Vegetative Index, which uses red and near-infrared reflectance as a proxy measurement for plant health. The authors tested the system at a small vineyard located in Albemarle County, Virginia, to better inform vineyard management of existing problems and trends in primary crop and undergrowth. Preliminary findings indicate the value of using this indicator-based approach for analyzing crop health in vineyards.

In light of the continued dearth of an online Community of Practice for the collaborative development and distribution of educational materials for Human Computer Interaction, we propose EduGit. EduGit is a web application that serves as a platform for publishing, adopting, and collaboratively authoring educational resources. The system facilitates and incentivizes publishing and adoption of course materials through interactions with existing learning management systems and estimates impact through aggregate material adoption and usage statistics.

An effective and efficient sensor network is an essential component of an automated urban greenhouse (AUG). This paper describes a design process that prototyped a smart sensor network as part of a capstone design project. This smart sensor network communicates among sensing, power and automation, and visualization and user interface aspects of the AUG to provide automatic monitoring of lighting, heating, watering, and ventilation. This automated urban greenhouse, along with the sensor network, is being installed at a local elementary school in downtown York, Pennsylvania. It will serve as an educational tool and create awareness of the importance of fresh foods.

Electronic textiles provide a means for embedding electronics and conductive wires into fabric to make smart garments that can serve as platforms for a wide variety of applications. This chapter presents prototypes developed by the Virginia Tech E-Textiles Lab over the past few years, with a focus on creating smart garments for motion capture and activity classification.

This paper presents a feasibility study of a wearable computing system to protect construction workers from carbon monoxide poisoning. A pulse oximetry sensor has been integrated into a typical construction helmet to allow continuous and noninvasive monitoring of workers' blood gas saturation levels. To show the feasibility of monitoring for carbon monoxide poisoning without subjecting users to dangerous conditions, a prototype for monitoring blood O2 saturation was constructed and tested during a user study involving typical construction tasks to determine its reliability while undergoing motion. As monitoring for O2 and CO simply differ in the number of wavelengths of light employed, if monitoring O2 is feasible, then monitoring for CO will be feasible as well. Using this equivalency, the results of this initial study show that integrating an oximeter into a construction helmet will warn the user of impending carbon monoxide poisoning with a probability greater than 99%. Note to Practitioners-This work addresses the issue of carbon monoxide exposure on construction sites. A noninvasive blood oxygen saturation sensor, called a pulse oximeter, was integrated into a typical construction helmet to investigate the reliability of continuous monitoring of construction workers. The pulse oximetry sensing technology was shown to be reliable under typical construction tasks such that a worker would be alerted of impending carbon monoxide poisoning before becoming impaired. Additional work is required with more complex tasks as well as isolating the sensor from motion artifacts generated by head movement.

PurposeTo be successful, pervasive computing requires a balance of computing, design, and business requirements to be considered throughout the design process. Achieving this synthesis requires a level of interdisciplinary design that is not present in current pervasive design tools. To understand the state of the art and provide insight to future tool designers, the purpose of this paper is to present a survey of design tools for pervasive computing and consider their ability to be used in interdisciplinary design.Design/methodology/approachThe authors have performed a survey of tools covering many areas within pervasive computing and have evaluated the abilities of each tool with established metrics for pervasive design tools.FindingsWhile the paper has found many design tools are available for constructive pervasive applications, few are suitable through all phases of the design cycle or useful across all the intended application domains of pervasive computing.Originality/valueThis survey provides an understanding of the state of pervasive design tools, with regards to interdisciplinary design, which has not previously been performed. Additionally, the authors provide evaluations of the pervasive tools when used in an interdisciplinary setting. These evaluations provide insight to key metrics and allow tool designers to understand the needs of their intended audience.

Virginia Tech offers an interdisciplinary design course for pervasive computing products, with the goal of providing undergraduates with the interdisciplinary and technical skills required to design and develop pervasive computing devices. The course has been developed and taught by a team of faculty from three departments-Electrical and Computer Engineering, Industrial Design, and Marketing-and a faculty member from the Department of Engineering Education has helped develop the class's interdisciplinary teaming processes.

This paper reports on a design experience for undergraduates in computer engineering, industrial design, and marketing that focuses on pervasive computing devices. Across a broad range of targeted application areas and user groups, many of the student designs have been wearable computers. Consequently, our course will be of interest to the wearable computing community, particularly in terms of our aim of bridging the gap between design and engineering. For the two most recent offerings of the course, we have utilized external observers and surveyed the students in order to validate the impact of aspects of our process and changes to it. This paper is based upon 5 years of experience and 2 years of analysis of our course, and it presents an overview of our process with both qualitative and quantitative results from these two most recent offerings.

In this paper we outline methods for extracting behavioral descriptions of interactive prototypes from electronic storyboards. This information is used to help interdisciplinary design teams evaluate potential ideas early in the design process. Using electronic story- boards provides a common descriptive medium where team members from diff erent disciplinary backgrounds can collectively express the intended behavior of their prototype. The behavioral information is extracted by a combination of visual tags applied to elements of the storyboard, analysis of storyboard layout, and natural language processing of text written in the frames. We describe this process, provide a proof of concept example, and discuss design choices in developing this tool. This material is based upon work supported by National Science Foundation under Grant No. EEC-0935103 and the Virginia Tech Institute for Creativity Arts and Technology.

This experience report presents the planning, execution and results of an exploratory 5-day musical instrument MAKErs camp for K-12 students. Students used various hardware sensors, a graphical programming environment and different physical prototyping techniques to create musical instruments. The design of a musical instrument introduces students to the full spectrum of the design process including form factor and function. Throughout the camp, students shared and performed in front of their peers to gain feedback as they iterated through the design of a musical instrument.

In an interdisciplinary setting, the rapid creation and evaluation of prototypes is critical to achieve a favorable design outcome. For pervasive computing systems, this means creating many interactive prototypes, often when non-computing team members are unfamiliar with programming, networking, or sensing. To overcome this difficulty we propose the use of electronic storyboards as a tool to define pervasive computing systems. Our research will show how storyboards can be used to capture behavioral elements such as action, context, and time. From the storyboard we will create formal models about the behavior of the prototype that can be synthesized or simulated.

This paper reports on a design experience for undergraduates in computer engineering, industrial design, and marketing that focuses on pervasive computing devices. Across a broad range of targeted application areas and user groups, many of the student designs have been wearable computers. Consequently, our course will be of interest to the wearable computing community, particularly in terms of our aim of bridging the gap between design and engineering. For the two most recent offerings of the course, we have utilized external observers and surveyed the students in order to validate the impact of aspects of our process and changes to it. This paper presents an overview of our process with both qualitative and quantitative results from these two most recent offerings.

This paper presents a feasibility study of a wearable computing system to protect construction workers from carbon monoxide poisoning. A pulse oximetry sensor has been integrated into a typical construction helmet to allow continuous and non-invasive monitoring of workers' blood saturation levels. To show the feasibility of monitoring for carbon monoxide poisoning without subjecting users to dangerous conditions, a prototype for monitoring blood O 2 was constructed and tested during a user study involving typical construction tasks to determine its reliability while undergoing motion. Because monitoring for blood O 2 and CO involve the same principles and technologies, if monitoring O 2 is feasible, then monitoring for CO will be feasible as well. The results of this initial study show that integrating an oximeter into a construction helmet will warn the user of impeding carbon monoxide poisoning with a probability greater than 99%.