Rutgers Engineering Students Design Solutions to Current Challenges

The latest technological designs for solving everyday tasks may very well have just been unveiled at Rutgers University. 

On Dec. 6, senior engineering students at Rutgers showed off the fruits of nearly a year of their labors in a daylong forum. 

This past January, 32 senior students in the Industrial and Systems Engineering program at Rutgers were given tasks to design, including an anatomically correct prosthetic hand, an automated volleyball serving machine, a medication dispenser, an automated inventory device. 

Working in groups of four, the teams had to design all aspects of the devices and build a prototype. On Friday, they presented their projects to their peers, instructors, friends and family. 

Faculty at the School of Engineering create the tasks each year, but it is the students who create the designs, according to professor Elsayed A. Elsayed, chair of the Industrial Systems Engineering department at the Rutgers School of Engineering.  

They were taught the fundamentals of design and from January to December worked on the projects, with last week's presentations serving as the culmination of their work.

All of the students were seniors, and many of them already have job offers lined up, Elsayed said.

Some of those students who are on their way to the job world designed a medication dispenser for use by healthcare professionals.

The device aims to cut down on human error in hospitals by cataloging and dispensing medication as it is requested or scheduled, according to Evan Vinjamuri, of Green Township. 

It is also intended to save time for medical professionals by dispensing medication on-demand, or on a schedule, eliminating the need for a person to manually retrieve it, according to the group.

The machine doesn't just spit out pills when a button is pressed. The shelves holding the medication had to be designed to the closest fraction of an inch, otherwise the machine would not be able to lift it, said Jonathan Murray, of Princeton.

Sara Posada of Bergenfield said her group created a machine that automatically serves volleyballs for the purpose of competitive training.

The machine had three settings that served the balls in different frequencies, depending on the level of difficulty desired. The machine was on wheels, so it could easily move across a court. 

Testing it proved to be a challenge, she said, as wheeling the large machine to the campus gym for testing wasn't easy, she said.  

Jamie Galiastro's team designed an energy-efficient prosthetic hand that is capable of a full range of motion, meant to resemble the movements of a human hand as closely as possible. 

Sensors on the fingers can detect temperature and the amount of pressure needed to lift an object without crushing it, said Galiastro, a Howell resident.
The hand can also lift and move items that require fine movement, such as a pen. 

Many prosthetics available on the market do not have these features, Galiastro said.