We have been busy bees trying to polish up everything for symposium day! 🐝

The FW team has been hard at work tuning the sensors and working on a good visualization so that visitors can intuitively understand the biosensor readings. Please come to our station tomorrow to check it out.

In summary, we plan to show temperature sensor readings trending up + heart beat frequency increasing = Peltier begins active cooling (which people can feel by touch or observe visually with status LEDs). We also want to show how the device is worn (see below) and manual cooling toggle.

Since we do not want water in a busy symposium setting near electronics and outlets, we chose not to demo the skin conductance sensor (which originally we tested by dabbing water on skin). However, we will be showing a video of the concept at our station.

This is what the final product looks like!

We are very pleased with the result and happy with how it is worn (which we changed for better demo-ing and robustness):

We have straps of differing lengths for whatever part of the body the user wants to wear it. Please visit our station to take a look!

We were also able to try it on our friends around E7 for some informal user testing - we are pleased to report that the cooling is easily felt and that people were impressed by how quickly the Peltier module gets cold. Many people also came up to us throughout the afternoon to ask to use it again since the Gear Lab was really warm. We see that as success! 🎉

Here is a video of the device recognizing body heat vs ambient air (this threshold was used just for demo purposes, as in real life, it would be body temp vs hot flash body temp). The solid white light at the end means that the Peltier is cooling:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JyqIfZPHp_Z5bgbhfA1LRmEfa_boc_yZ/view?usp=sharing

Here is a vide where a wet paper towel was wiped across the skin to test the GSR sensors. The flashing white LED shows the device recognizes an elevated level of skin conductance. Upon moving the device back to dry skin, the flashing goes away:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LEsrXLReQvkWeYyats3tmX7Oph-pB6kE/view?usp=sharing

One of our mechanical members also made an exploded view diorama to show the inner workings of the device - he is an arts and crafts master:

If you ever wondered how many iterations of the case we printed, well… here it is…