Custom-Designed Prosthetics and Pothole Scanners are Winners on Innovation Day

A team of biomedical engineering students who designed a body-powered prosthetic index finger for a carpenter who lost part of one in an accident were the first-place winners of this year’s TechQuest Challenge, announced earlier this month at NJIT’s seventh annual Innovation Day.

Their prosthesis, which features an artificial interphalangeal (hinge) joint system, uses the force generated by the remaining part of the finger to power it, thus mimicking normal finger flexion and extension. To make it affordable, the four-member team of seniors – Ricardo Garcia, the project leader, Madison Taylor, Christian Pignataro and Giovanna Nolan – developed a method for manufacturing it with a 3D printer, using strong, inexpensive materials.

“For a carpenter, losing this part of a finger is a very big problem,” noted Taylor. “In terms of design, a key challenge was making sure that it could be easily reproduced if damaged.”

“It’s very unusual to have a specific person for whom you’re designing a prosthesis, and that’s what makes this project so exciting,” said Sergei Adamovich, a professor of biomedical engineering and the team’s adviser.

NJIT Innovation Day is an invention-packed showcase of cutting-edge, student-led research, design and development across programs and disciplines. The winners were among more than 60 student projects on display – from autonomous lawn care equipment, to lightweight solar arrays for solar vehicles, to a tornado water filtration bottle, to a platform that provides visual feedback on human balance control.

Another team of biomedical engineers, seniors Ryan Rattazzi and Emad Haque, took second place in the TechQuest competition for creating a prosthetic forearm powered by electric signals generated by the muscles. Their arm is capable of two degrees of motion in the wrist and one degree of motion in the fingers. Additionally, to satisfy what the pair called an “unmet market need,” it was designed to have the look and feel of skin.

“There is a real need for inexpensive prosthetic arms up to the elbow,” Rattazzi noted.

Ultimately, Haque added, the arm would provide supplementary degrees of motion, advanced integrated electronics to create an even faster system response and a mobile application for controlling the sensitivity of the device.

The third-place winner was Jorim Morainvil, a construction engineering technology student who invented a novel pothole scanner.

“There is a need for systems that can rapidly detect road damage,” Morainvil noted in his proposal. Manual methods are lengthy, error-prone, and costly and existing, he observed, while existing automated methods can be expensive, accurate under limited conditions or prone to false alarms.

“We propose a novel electro-mechanical solution that houses a 2D LIDAR, but moves it in three dimensions (along x, y, and z axes). The benefit of this approach is that we can use a low-cost 2D LIDAR and generate 3D scans like the ones required for high fidelity pothole scanning,” he said.

For the first time, the event began with a panel discussion on research, innovation and entrepreneurship. Panelists included research scientists from major corporations, including Paul Doll, lead technical scientist for the advanced materials division at The Dow Chemical Company; Melinda Einsla, a research scientist for Dow Chemical; and Lucas Dorazio, the team leader for gasoil technologies refinery catalyst R&D at BASF Corporation. Dorazio, an adjunct professor in NJIT’s Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, recently received Newark College of Engineering’s “Excellence in Teaching by an Adjunct” award.

Govi Rao, co-chair of NJIT’s Undergraduate Research and Innovation advisory board and co-founder and managing partner of Carbon Group Global, moderated the discussion, in which the scientists described their work on developing chemical-free thermal paper, reducing the odor from paint and improving the catalytic processes in oil refining.

“It is so important that our students understand how research leads to innovative solutions,” said Atam Dhawan, senior vice provost for research, in introducing the panel.

“Research, innovation and entrepreneurship – these are distinct skill sets,” Rao noted.

Innovation Day assembles the university’s key undergraduate research and innovation programs and competitions. These contests and programs are designed to help students become researchers and innovators with the know-how, technical savvy and experience to identify and address important unmet societal needs.

The programs include:

TechQuest, an undergraduate invention competition sponsored by James Stevenson, a retired Honeywell scientist and consultant at Stevenson PolyTech LLC.

The Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program, which helps students compete for awards for their research presentations and enroll in graduate programs.

The Undergraduate Research and Innovation Program, which enables students to become researchers and to select projects that will address societal problems, enhance our quality of life and contend with global challenges.

The Student Innovation Acceleration Club, which gives students the forum to develop business concepts utilizing a lean start-up methodology.

The Newark Innovation Acceleration Challenge, a collaboration between NJIT and Capital One Bank, which aims to ignite business development in Newark by empowering budding entrepreneurs.

The NSF I-Corps Sites Program, which provides specialized training and mini-grants up to $3,000 to teams interested in exploring the commercial viability of their ideas for products and businesses that are based on their own inventions, University intellectual property or any STEM-related technology.