Proper blood circulation is essential to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Unfortunately, most people above the age of 70 suffer from declining or poor circulation and are in need of help. Age is just one of many high risk factors for developing Deep Vein Thrombosis, a condition where the  human body fails to circulate blood through the extremes of the body, causing abnormal clotting and that can cause pulmonary embolisms, heart attacks, and strokes. Thermaform Technologies is developing the solution.

Drop Foot is a motor function disorder which results from brain injury or disorders such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, or strokes. Drop foot inhibits one’s ability to dorsiflex the foot, i.e. lift their foot towards their shin. This inability leads to one dragging the tip of their foot when walking, which significantly decreases one's walking and can lead to their foot catching and causing one to trip and fall.

Robotic autonomy is the direction of the future. Our VELMA robot can efficiently search an unknown environment and successfully find a color coded target object. With a Raspberry Pi as the computing unit, and Robot Operating System (ROS) serving as the framework, our software creates a map of the vehicle’s surroundings and avoids obstacles by leveraging simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) software combined with LiDAR data. Additionally, we fuse LiDAR scans with odometry data from the speed controller for improved localization.

In this project, students laid the foundation for passive shoes that altered friction and shape, which led further refinements, a pilot study, and a published paper that eventually transformed into Cadense.

Heeluxe is a lead shoe testing company that is determined to help footwear companies make better shoes. This year, Heeluxe is tackling the problem of simulating shoes’ performance in an ice environment. The capstone team is helping the company to build such testing enclosures that include an ice surface and cold environment. The ice surface is an ice sheet that can be made repeatedly and quickly in a freezer from an custom engineered ice mold that is designed to provide a smooth and strong surface. The Igloo structure is designed to have an internal temperature no higher than four Celcius.