Meet our Clients! (Pt. 2)

This semester (Spring ‘20), Generate is working with six clients, four hardware-focused and two software-focused. Get to know more about them directly from their project leads! This is part two of a two part series to get to learn more about Generate and the clients we work with. Check out the first blog here.

MentorMatch

By Nick Kaffine

MentorMatch is a peer mentoring platform where alumni guide current high school students transition to college and careers. Each mentoring group is specific to a high school, and their administrators benefit by having access to the active alumni community.

MentorMatch is solving the problem for students. Public high school students lack hands-on advice, as guidance counselors face high student-to-counselor ratios with a U.S. average of 482:1. Some counselors do not have a deep insight into every college and career. Public high schools also lack a way to utilize and engage their alumni.

Generate is helping MentorMatch build a platform to allow students to search for mentors based on various attributes such as what college and major. Generate’s goal for the semester is to build the foundations of a platform that MentorMatch can use as they begin to scale up users.

Currently, they have a prototype using an online platform building software which allows them to rapidly prototype features, but will not be scalable in the long term. The main challenges we are facing now are how to design an easily scalable platform. We are focusing a lot on how to effectively break up the platform into independent services.

Medsix

By James Ridzon

The company that my team is working with, Medsix, was started by Northeastern alumnus, Nikin Tharan, right after he graduated. The product is an extension of the work that he did during his capstone in 2019. It is my team’s task to create a prototype of a smart wound drainage bag that will allow the collection of drainage data over time. This device will be marketed to hospitals on the proposition that complication and re-admittance rates will decrease if this device is implemented.

“After major organ surgeries such as abdominal, breast, craniotomy, mastectomy, thoracic, and joint replacement surgery, patients are frequently discharged home with a drain (Jackson-Pratt) in order to remove the excess fluid from the operated area in the body as the wound heals. In a hospital, a nurse would monitor the volume and color of the discharge frequently to determine any early signs of an infection. However when the patient is sent home they are responsible for maintaining the drain and monitoring the output. Few can afford a home health nurse. This introduces errors because the patient sometimes forgets to record an output or takes down the wrong volume or color measurement. In many cases, this leads to late diagnosis and analysis of an infection or more serious issues. This lack of attention can ultimately lead to patients being readmitted to the hospital and increased mortality rates.”

Nikin Tharan, CEO and Founder of Medsix

We are developing a smart wound drainage system that tracks volumetric and color data in real time. This allows patients, nurses, and doctors to take a data-centric approach to understanding wound health and quickly identify warning signs of complications and malfunctions.

I wouldn’t say that there have been any particularly large challenges that we have faced thus far in our research and concept generation stage of development. Though looking forward, I’d say the biggest challenge will be testing and validating the prototype concepts to ensure that the reliability and accuracy are where we want them to be.

Medsix would like Generate to create a works-like-prototype, develop key subsystems, and conduct user experience research and development. This will allow them to have a firm understanding of the market viability of this product and inform future development.

DeepCharge

By Jacob Londa

DeepCharge is a spinout from a Northeastern University research. They are creating the FlyPad, which is an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) wireless charging pad that intelligently charges one or more UAVs anywhere on its surface through patented sensing and charging technologies.

UAVs being used for emergency or time critical purposes suffer from poor battery life. Once the battery is low, the UAV must return to the pilot to recharge or change batteries. This interrupts missions where maximum in-flight time is very important.

A portable landing pad that can wirelessly charge the UAVs without a need for exact positional accuracy solves this issue.The FlyPad is one of the most technologically complex products that Generate has ever worked on. Being able to break it down into individual components and tasks has been a challenge so far. But we have successfully narrowed down a few sections to work on, and we’re ready for the challenge ahead.

Generate will further the design of the FlyPad. On the electrical and computer engineering side, this will consist of designing the Power Distribution system, which is responsible for the power distribution from the batteries to the coil networks as well as the power management and UAV communication firmware. On the mechanical engineering side, this will consist of designing a housing for the internal electronics and making it ready for manufacturing.