Students Earn Highest Praise at Design Day 2023

New ECE graduates Noah Butler and Evan Rains took home the $7,500 Dean’s Award for Most Outstanding Project at Craig M. Berge Design Day 2023. Team 23078, which also included three biomedical engineering majors, won the award for their Snorpheus project, a medical device designed to help detect and alleviate obstructive sleep apnea. 

Since OSA is caused by snoring, snorpheus is worn at night to record snoring audio and sleep positions. It then processes the audio to inform patients and clinicians about what body positions and times of night lead to the most snoring. By using machine learning, the team didn’t have to manually listen through the eight hours of sleeping audio. Instead, the software was able to identify the data via spectrograms in just a few seconds.

“The students surprised me in the way they quickly picked up the machine learning parts,” said Nirav Merchant, Team 23078’s sponsor advisor and director of the UA Data Science Institute. “The students were so enthusiastic and hardworking in this project, though I feel they would have been more effective if they had two years to work on it. They had so much to learn so quickly.”