STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Lost and Found

Friday seems like the perfect day to catch up with another one of our STEM-In-Action grant winning teams! If you're just tuning into the eCYBER Blog, we've got the scoop! The U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) STEM-In-Action Grant awards eCYBERMISSION teams up to $5,000 to develop their projects into mature and scalable solutions in their community. Typically, we award this honorary grant to five teams, but in 2020 ten lucky teams took home the prestigious award. Today we are headed out west to catch up with team Lost and Found from Portland, Oregan to see how they are continuing to combat the missing persons crisis.

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We are the team “Lost and Found”, a neighborhood-based team from Portland, Oregon, composed of 8th graders attending Stoller Middle School and RoboRink. We are on a mission to reimagine search-and-rescue with our product “The Third Eye”, a self-charging location monitoring device to track your loved ones!

According to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), over 600,000 US persons went missing in 2018 costing nearly $2B in search and rescue, with our home state Oregon ranking third in the country. Our original design was based on the self-powered aspect of the design, focusing on a group of materials possessing a property called piezoelectricity (a material property that converts mechanical energy into usable electrical energy). In our second design, we connected a GPS transmitter to the device and focused on making the design more practical in real-life use. We have also developed the capability to connect the data through the use of an application on family and friends’ mobile devices that shares the data real-time. As a next step we are understanding requirements through our mentors to possibly alert authorities with the push of a button. 

Our Progress since last update: We built a prototype using the products called out in the picture above, fitted into a mini cardboard box and open source software. During the testing of our prototype, our team faced challenges concerning the sturdiness of the box we have been using. In the original “Third Eye” design, we used a firm cardboard box to store the components of the solution, but this was not very good at supporting the internal parts of the design. One of our main ideas is to 3D print the “Third Eye” insert to make sure the structure and components inside remain intact as an insert or wearable form-factor that can attach to either school bags or shoes, or other areas where there will be motion, to convert mechanical to electrical energy to charge our device. We created multiple 3D design and printed prototypes with the STEM grant to develop a design that’s wearable and is reliable. 

Through further research, we have learned that harvesting energy from human body movements is possible using piezo pressure pads. By applying pressure on piezo pads, we can convert mechanical energy to electrical energy and store the energy generated in capacitors prior to transferring into rechargeable battery packs. We are working with Meggitt, a local company based in Oregon, creating Piezo Paints, which will allow us to create a flexible piezo material to attach to the Third Eye. Each time when there’s a mechanical stress applied to this flexible material, by using the rest of the electronic circuitry we can convert that stress to an electrical energy to store in capacitors to charge the micro-controller powering the GPS device.

Challenges we faced: To address long-range solution we plan to develop a solution similar to how the bird migration is monitored that is a small device that is attached to the bird is capable of sending specific signatures and in high-risk neighborhoods we could install multiple tracking stations that can record the signatures each time they receive the sent device signatures to be able to monitor and communicate location real-time. However, further exploration on this was delayed due to the global pandemic as most of our State was closed for several months. All of us are still in full-time distance learning mode, and thus were unable to meet in person to enhance our electronic design.

Note: These photos were taken prior to COVID-19

Plan ahead: To further our solution using our Stem-in-Action grant money, we are working on connecting our Third Eye device with the user’s phone to easily access data created by the GPS tracker at large scale. Using the language Python and the platform Flutter, we continued developing our prototype to gauge the practicality of our app. We are on track to build multiple devices and distribute them for our first phase of testing. 

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Team Lost and Found has taken on the mission of allowing parents, guardians and whoever else worries about their loved ones when they go away and has made them feel a sense of comfort and relief. Helping take on the missing persons crisis is a global feat and this team's idea to use their Third Eye tracking device is sure to help millions of families across the US and the world feel better knowing that their loved ones are safe.

-Mission Control

Colleen Minan
AEOP Communications & Marketing Specialist
cminan@nsta.org