What is Senior Design?
You've been trained and educated for many years and now it is time to put your books aside a bit, roll up your sleeves, and put into action your newly minted skills. Demonstrate to yourself it is possible and was all worth it! During your senior year you bridge the gap between your academic experience and professional experience by participating in year-long design projects that involve real projects and real clients. Along with your faculty advisor, you will work closely with a sponsoring company or government agency to develop a product proposal, conduct the design analysis, produce a schedule and budget, design and build a prototype, debug and troubleshoot, prepare engineering reports, and then present your results to the sponsor and in a public forum.
Some of the Sponsors: Boeing, Microsoft, Kenworth, AT&T, Cisco, and many others. In keeping with university mission some teams take on socially conscious engineering projects, such as designing devices that assist persons with disability and developing green/renewable energy products.
Graduate Perspective
Kiran Dhanoa and Sarah Mansa, both Seattle University graduates, believe that the Senior Design Project experience has been integral to their success as engineers and their ability to compete in the job market.
Kiran feels that her education at Seattle University, and her experiences in the Senior Design project in particular, helped to differentiate her from her peers at other universities and, therefore, made her more competitive in the job market. She agrees that the Senior Design project is a wonderful opportunity to network with employers, and even sees it as the first step in the job seeking process. Continue to full article...
Sarah says that acting as a project manager in the Senior Design project allowed her to develop and sharpen her leadership abilities. Sarah Mansa graduated from Seattle University with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. She is currently employed by the Boeing Company as a member of the Research and Development department, focusing on the area of Electromagnetics. Sarah feels that her Senior Design experience greatly impacted her ability to obtain her position at Boeing. Continue to full article...
Senior Design Projects
A few example design team projects.
GPU Based Image Processing Real-Time JPEG Codec Feasibility Study
Team ECE07.03
Sponsor: Philips Medical Systems
Philips Medical Systems teams up with Seattle University to develop a new JPEG encoding process to save cost and improve reliability of it's ultrasound machines.
Our team accomplished the goal by transferring the processing load of encoding JPEG files from higher cost Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of a video card.
Patient Data Tracking Using RFID Technology
Team ECE08.05
Sponsor: Philips Medical Systems
Philips Medical Systems and the Seattle University's Electrical & Computer Engineering Team collaborate on the development of a process of automation of patient data entry in hospitals and diagnostic ultrasound clinics using RFID Technology.
Traditionally, hospital patients are identified by wristbands, medical notes are physically carried from place to place, and schedules are hastily rewritten as things change. Mix-ups can result in patients having the wrong records, the wrong drugs being administered, and even the wrong surgery being performed.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a method of storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags. When you buy a pair of pants it often has a RFID tag attached so why not tag a patient’s wristband?
In support of Philips Healthcare's commitment to quality patient care our team designed, built, and presented an innovative RFID solution using:
- Texas Instruments microprocessor-controller.
- Designing and building of a miniaturized printed loop antenna.
- Advanced Encryption Standard 256 bit keys for personal data security.
- Compression Algorithm based on a combination LZ77 and Huffman Coding to store the quantity of data on the tag.
- The design was completed well within the original budget.
Collaborating Senior Design Team Members: Riley Higa, Andrew Kurniadi, Min Kyeong Lee, Robert Nguon, and Mark John Merin.
Automated Multicolor In-Cluster Tell-Tale System
Team ECE07.03
Sponsor: The Boeing Company
Seattle University Senior Students working jointly with Kenworth got their boots muddy in a project consisted of “proof of concept” design and prototype for Kenworth’s Automated Tell-Tale Identification and multi-color Tell-Tale systems. These systems, when implemented, will allow Kenworth to provide a higher quality, more flexible product at a lower cost. It is joint projects such as these that provide students with an unprecedented opportunity to tap into the rich resources, knowledge, and unique skills of world-class companies such as Kenworth to produce the very best educational experience .
Kenworth Truck Company, a division of PACCAR Inc, is a leading manufacturer of heavy and medium duty trucks. Kenworth's success can be traced back to a philosophy established at the beginning in 1923: Build a custom truck and build it to last. Back then, it was said that Kenworth engineers weren't afraid to "get their boots muddy" as they journeyed into the field with customers to understand the demands put on their vehicles. Today, Kenworth continues to listen carefully to customer needs, then builds custom trucks that will meet those needs. That's why they call them "The World's Best."
