BME Students Earn Top Honors at Design Day 2023

New BME graduates Christine Carlson, Logan Deane and Nisha Rajakrishna took home the $7,500 Dean’s Award for Most Outstanding Project at Craig M. Berge Design Day 2023. Team 23078, which also included two  electrical and computer engineering majors, won the award for their Snorpheus project, a medical device designed to help detect and alleviate obstructive sleep apnea, which is caused by snoring. 

“OSA is implicated as a disease on its own, but also with a lot of serious medical conditions like cardiac complications,” Rajakrishna said. “So with a device like this, we can get ahead of the negative effects of those disorders by training our patients to not sleep in those positions that will cause snoring.”

Snorpheus is worn at night to record snoring audio and sleep positions. It then processes the audio to inform patients and clinicians about what body positions and times of night lead to the most snoring. By using machine learning, the team didn’t have to manually listen through the eight hours of sleeping audio. Instead, the software was able to identify the data via spectrograms in just a few seconds.

“It gave me real world experience that you don’t always get in college,” Deane said. “It really opened up my love of research and development and makes me want to pursue that more as a career. It also taught me more technical skills, specifically how to intertwine different disciplines.”