Building a solution - UWI Faculty of Engineering answering COVID-19 call

THE FACULTY of Engineering at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona campus, is stepping up to the plate in the fight against the new coronavirus (COVID-19) through its final-year projects and commercial arm, Mona-Tech Engineering Services.

Its activities are propelled by its students under the astute guidance of student leaders and faculty .

As we face the unprecedented challenges posed by COVID-19, not only are students remotely completing the remainder of their studies, but they are innovating through their final projects and volunteering for engineering initiatives.

“One of the things the faculty did was to step up and start repairing ventilators. [The faculty], in partnership with Mona-Tech, are doing those repairs. Some of our students are working on those ventilators. Some of our students and past students have actually worked on personal protective equipment. You may have heard about the face shields that are being produced with 3-D printers, and they are also working on a low-cost ventilator that will be used to help supplement what we have already in the island,” said Adrian Lawrence, acting dean of the Faculty of Engineering.

INNOVATIVE FINAL-YEAR PROJECTS

The work of the faculty also includes new ventures, namely final projects that solve COVID-19-related issues. Three of a total of 22 final projects for this year’s cohort have the ability to solve issues that have arisen due to the emergence of COVID-19 in Jamaica.

These include a low-cost patient-monitoring system by Danelle Julal and a vehicle pass mobile application and near-field communication reader by Justine Shaw. Work is also ongoing on an automatic personal protective equipment detector that determines if an individual is adequately attired and protected to enter a work area.

The engineering faculty has a clear mandate for its final-year projects. Faculty members are charged with finding a real-world problem they want the students to solve. In turn, students have the option of choosing the project they are most interested in working on.

For Julal, it was important to work on a project in the healthcare field.

“A lot of patients are isolating, and they need to be monitored. It would be best if they could be monitored remotely and the nurse [is alerted if something changes],” said the final-year electronics engineering student.

Her device will allow healthcare workers to input safe thresholds for a patient’s vitals, including heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature, for constant monitoring. If there is a drop or increase, the healthcare worker is alerted. With cost being very important, Julal noted that the biggest investment for her device is the server needed for each hospital.

The current pandemic has not changed the initial function of her project, but it has given her a more pressing deadline. Similarly, Justine Shaw, also a final-year electronics engineering student, would like to get her device up and running, especially on campus, where, to prevent the possibility of spreading COVID-19, guards have stopped distributing parking passes.

“Right now, our gates at UWI, they have no passes,” said Shaw. “It would be good for my system to track who can come on campus [and] who can’t come on campus,” said Shaw. She notes that without this tracking, organisations are more susceptible to criminal elements.

For Lindon Falconer, the head of electronics engineering and acting head of electrical power engineering, the fact that the projects were developed before Jamaica recorded its first COVID-19 case but are capable of addressing current challenges, is a sign that the programmes are headed in the right direction in terms of the application of engineering.

“From day one, our main aim is to ensure that the students are working on projects that are relevant to society, things that solve problems within society,” said Falconer, who also supervises and coordinates the final-year projects.

The final project is a big part of an engineering student’s grade-point average (GPA). It’s a yearlong, six-credit course worth 30 per cent of their GPA and is a multi-tiered process. As these students prepare to defend their creations, the faculty is focusing on a key component — funding.

“The mandate of most of our projects is to make it low-cost. However, funding is usually a major, major part of being able to mass-produce these solutions. So once the projects are complete and we realise or we’ve developed it to its full potential, then we’ll be able to take it out there to get funding to be able to mass-produce it,” said Lawrence.

BIOMEDICAL REPAIRS

Also innovating is the Dr Paul Aiken-led Mona-Tech Engineering Services, the organisation charged with the operation and maintenance The UWI’s cogeneration plant. The current pandemic has led the team, with the help of student volunteers, to focus on biomedical repairs, including that of much-needed ventilators and patient-monitoring systems.

“When we got really serious about responding to the COVID, we were told that there were only 25 ventilators in the country that’s functioning. We know from past experience that they have been some broken ones sitting down in the various hospitals, so we immediately reached out to them,” said Aiken.

The team has also done repairs to a QIAcube machine, a sample processing instrument capable of conducting mass testing of COVID-19 samples.

To date, they have repaired seven ventilators for the University Hospital of the West Indies and five for the Kingston Public Hospital and Bustamante Hospital for Children, with another four awaiting parts and another possible two needing repair at the Spanish Town Hospital.

“Right now, that’s what we are focusing on – getting what’s broken to work to add more to the pool,” Aiken told The Gleaner.

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jamila.litchmore@gleanerjm.com