Group selection and assignments

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Overview

After your presentation about yourself we are setting up teams for the individual assignments. Each team consists of students from 3 nationalities from Ukraine, Israel and one country from Europe. You will be introduced to your team members during this session.

In order to anticipate your wishes and empower the teams, we will follow the following process for giving the assignments:

• Assignments are presented in the general auditorium (10 minutes)
• Each group discusses the assignments and setup a priority list (10 minutes)
• We compare the priority lists and select the assignment that their is a fair priority distribution between the groups. (10 minutes)

Assignment presentation

We will have a quick presentation of the assignment and you can read it below at this page of the wiki.

Priority claim

You have the following 8 "stickers":

• 2 stickers for "We would like to have this assignment!" (Priority P1)
• 3 stickers for "Sounds good to us, but not our favourites." (Priority P2)
• 3 stickers for "We don't know, but can accept the challenge." (Priority P3)

Go to the miroboard and place your stickers. You are only allowed to place one sticker per assignment. If there are two we will take the lower priority ;-) You have 10 minutes time to talk in your group and put the stickers. You also can replace stickers. If you know the selection algorithm, ...

Break out rooms are prepared for your group to have separate discussions. Via the miroboard the overall selection process is visible.

Selection algorithm

The highest priority takes the assignment. Our experience showed that usually this works out well. Nevertheless, we cannot guarantee that there aren't stickers with the same top priority level from two groups. In this case we 1.) try to find an assignment where a group placed its second Priority 31 sticker. 2.) otherwise one group is randomly choosen 3.) We will try to avoid that a group gets an assignment, where it placed a Priority P3 sticker. In this case it might happen that we rather give a "Sounds good" assignment to both groups.

To get the best results, we decided to make the claiming phase public. This offers more options and maybe allows you to take a different choice to resolve a double priority.

General assignment for online contest

Commercial space flight isn't the luxury for billionaires anymore. A roundtrip to moon and back becomes affordable for many persons, 10 space hotels are orbiting earth and interplanetary travel is on the brink of become real. Yet due to the increasing number of space tourists also medical emergencies increased in space - recently a space tourist even died, since he cannot receive treatment with a specialized medical device.

UN Space Regulation Agency, ESA and NASA are therefore demanding that tourist space ships and space complexes need to be equipped with a well-defined set of materials and a small 3D-printer to create bio-artificial implants or external prosthesis to safe passengers on board during this week trip through space.

The main commercial space operators are therefore inviting start-ups and university teams to attend a contest "10 minutes, 10 millions" to find clever ideas what medical devices to solve the following medical emergencies:

 The detailed assignments will be provided during the session only 

A preliminary list of material is defined, yet you have the chance to place two extra, specialized parts on the list. Mind that weight is crucial and small sized, light parts are preferred and give extra points in the evaluation.

What are the limiting factors for your design? (Requirements)

• The implant/prosthesis needs to build with the materials available on board. Only the following materials and manufacturing technologies are available.

• An electronic sensor + controller needs be used to enable monitoring the functionality of the device or on patient data.

• Functionality is the primary goal, but also think about the astronaut to wear this device. It needs to be comfortable and also design should not be neglected. Do you want to be call a disgusting BORG or a cool looking superman?

• The designed device should be lightweight, compact and easy to use. The device interface must have a low entry threshold to work with it.

• The measurement of biological parameters or control of the device should be capable to b carried out remotely (for example, via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth).

• Each device must have a unique identifier that must be transmitted to the server to identify the device.

• It is necessary to design the body and auxiliary fastening elements. Best prepare (first) source files for printing parts on a 3D printer.

• Consider that operating conditions vary in the range: from overloads during acceleration and deceleration to zero gravity.

• It is necessary to provide user feedback on the device (for example, sound and / or light notification).

• All disciplines need to work together to achieve a device that helps the astronaut and which is proudly worn by him.

Detailed assignments

 These assignments must not be provided to the students upfront. They will be provided at the beginning of the student contest!

Output of the hackaton

The time during this summerschool is limited and you will learn a lot of new things. We therefore ask you to focus on following things as outcome of the hackaton:

1. A business canvas elaborated for your product. You will receive training and the opportunity to design this business canvas in the related mini lecture on Monday.

2. A system concept including all necessary components, materials, 3D printed parts.

• A block diagram is the bare minimum, the sky is the limit for your creativity. A fancy drawing or even a comic might be additional ways to show the design of the device

• A design file and a visualization of a 3D printed part for your design. You have time on Wednesday afternoon to design this part.

• A electronic schematic of all modules you used including the control processor and all its peripherals. Use the datasheets to add necessary connections, define input and output ports,...

• A description of the software to assess the functionality. It is up to you how to present it. Flow diagrams or UML diagrams are good choices, but chose from your experience.

3. A presentation for pitching, which you create on Thursday afternoon in the respective training.

Assignment 1: Information and measuring system for monitoring biometric indicators of a crew member of a spacecraft

Description

During the colonization of space, constant monitoring of the condition of the crew members and the environment is necessary. This is important for long-term flights on modern spacecraft to nearby and distant planets, when astronauts are in orbital stations. Space tourism is also beginning to develop. Financing and insurance of such flights is provided by private companies, for which this is a new type of business. This increases the importance of collecting information about the health of travelers. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure the reliability and control of access to data. The performance of astronauts, their health, the integrity of their equipment, and the attainability of mission objectives depend on the effectiveness of monitoring their health. As the experience of previous flights has shown, many non-standard situations are possible in space, including physiological and neuropsychiatric problems for the crew. Problems with equipment are possible: disconnection of power supplies and lighting, depressurization, change in the gas composition of the atmosphere inside the ship, failure of the control system, etc. There are sources of influence external to the ship: anomalous radiation, collision with various bodies, etc. It is important to identify in time a condition that threatens the well-being or life of a crew member. This will allow each participant in interplanetary flights to assess the current situation and predict its development, to take measures to overcome it.

Your tasks is the design of an measuring system for monitoring biometric indicators of a crew member of a spacecraft, transferring information to a server for analysis and visualization. Its implementation implies monitoring the human condition (temperature, heart rate, pulse, breathing gas analyzer) and the environment (temperature, humidity, air composition) in order to make recommendations about the possibility of being in this environment and informing about deviations from normal parameters. It is required to provide control of the device and display of information using a minimum set of indicators and control elements.

Main supervisor/mentor of this assignment

Oleksandr Tarasov (alexandrtar50@gmail.com)

Assignment 2: Device for measuring surface electromyography of the hand and stimulation muscle tension

Description

During the space journey, someone injured a hand and it is out of functioning. What the team need is to check the propagation of nerve impulses in the limb and find the muscles that do not contract. So, they need a myograph that can measure the electrical potentials from the surface of the skin using metal electrodes.

Then, in order to avoid muscle degradation, it should be stimulated from time to time, so you need to design a device to periodically maintain muscle tension. It can use the same electrodes, so the device has to provide two modes: measurement and stimulation.

Please, think about how to attach electrodes to the limb. What electrode shape may be optimal? What information must be displayed? Also, you should provide safety during the stimulation process.

Main supervisor/mentor of this assignment

Dmytro Shtofel (VNTU, shtofel@vntu.edu.ua)

Assignment 3: Wearable or implantable automatic dispenser for drugs to provide drugs

Description

Despite all medical checks before start, astronauts suffer from a COVID-like disease. They will not be able to descent to the moon to harvest raw earth materials if not cured properly before arrival. Doctors found out that a medicine on board can relieve symptoms and prevent infection of the other crewmembers but need to be given every 5 minutes in very small doses.

You need to design an automatic dispenser pumping the medicine in the cardio-vascular system depending on the body temperature of the astronaut.

Design an automatic syringe set, a bracelet and a tool for remote supervision. It is important that the device is wearable or implantable and will not influence the mobility of the astronaut. In particular, keep care that the design is compact and cannot be detached accidentally, which would require new disinfection preventing an in-time cure. Also design a user interface to notify the astronaut about (mal)function of the device both for on-board and extra-vehicular activity in a spacesuit, since the medicine needs to be also given the first days on moon.

Main supervisor/mentor of this assignment

Albert Treytl (albert.treytl@donau-uni.ac.at), Gabor Kovacs (gabor.kovacs@donau-uni.ac.at)

Assignment 4: Exoskeleton for hurt elbow to allow the injured passenger to participate in the necessary routines

Description

A passenger got badly injured on the elbow and broke a bone in it. Since space travels take some time, a quick fix is necessary, as the nearest medical hospital can be days, weeks or even months away. As in space you mostly need your both hands to grasp things to navigate through the space-station or other spacecraft in a state of micro-gravity, it is important that the passenger gets an hardware aid to fix his broken elbow and still be able to move around with it.

An exoskeleton will help to stabilize the arm and provide enough extra strength to the patient to put force on it to navigate in a controlled manner. A minimum requirement for moving the device is the possibility to rotate in the plane between upper and lower arm. The arm should be locked in place on the skeleton to avoid movement and ensure the bone is in place to grow together.

Another requirement is to provide sensors (to trace and count movements, heartbeat.. ) of the patient via the exoskeleton so the medical team in the ground station can monitor the patient’s condition and can advise on extra measures and therapy. Since the bracelet is large you have and extra amount of filament for the 3D printing.

Main supervisor/mentor of this assignment

Peter Arras (peter.arras@kuleuven.be)

Assignment 5: A device to guide a passenger with disabled vision through the space ship

Description

During a maintenance job in the spacecraft an astronauts’ eyes got sprayed with a greasing fluid. The effect is that the astronaut is left temporarily without a clear vision. The astronaut can still detect color and light but has no detailed view of the surroundings.

As the team cannot afford to lose a valuable collaborator because of all the tasks, which need to be performed, they work on a device to help their colleague regain a way to navigate through the spacecraft.

So a wearable aid for the colleague that helps detect objects and generates visual feedback to control navigation in the known surroundings on the inner part of the spacecraft could be a solution. As color and light is still detected, a method with colored mapped dots could be a solution.

Accept the challenge and design a possible solution.

Main supervisor/mentor of this assignment

Aryeh Weiss(Aryeh.Weiss@biu.ac.il)