Current TIES Projects

Community Client: Town and Country Learning Center

Town and Country Housing Project: Beginning in Fall of 2008, students will be developing a variety of new media applications to provide educational enrichment and broaden the social experience of children and youth residing in Housing and Urban Development Housing Project in Diamond District of San Diego.

Community Client: Select group of San Diego middle school teachers

Middle School Enviromental Education Project:An environmental sensor network water quality maps, and an on-line science challenge game are being developed to bring interactive hands-on engineering education curriculum to middle school classrooms.

Community Client: United Cerebral Palsy of San Diego County

Universal Toy Adaptor: Popular children’s toys are being modified for children with special needs; an interactive, user friendly web forum is being developed with a toy librarian; and an adaptive cell phone device is being built for young adults with Cerebral.

Community Client: Save Our Children's Sight

Digital Vision Screening System: The hardware and software specifications of a pediatric digital vision screening system identifying children with potential eye problems, needs to be updated. This long-term project aims to upgrade the current screening system using an up-to-date, high-resolution digital camera and specialized lens model and developing new screening software. This new TIES project will help provided comprehensive vision care for low-income preschoolers in San Diego County.

Community Client: UCSD Student-Run Free Clinic

Digital Record System: The UCSD Student-Run Free Clinic Project, in partnership with the community, provides accessible, quality healthcare for the underserved in a respectful environment in which students, health professionals, patients, and community members learn from one another. Students will be working with UCSD medical school students and faculty to develop a digital record system with medical, psychiatric, and other services integrated into a single database in order to better serve the underserved of San Diego. Possible integration of hand-helds for access to database when serving the homeless might be needed. Multiple visits to community clinics will be an integral part of this project.

Community Client: TIES and National EPICS

myTIES: The programmatic software used in all TIES teams, myTIES, is in need of an upgrade. Designing of the software by the actual users will be a useful advantage. Students at UCSD will be working with National EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) to develop modular software that can be used at various sites of engineering service-learning programs, such as TIES. In an age of increased globalization, students will obtain necessary skills of working on a multi-site, nation-wide project.

Community Client: National Federation of the Blind

Grocery Shopping Assistant for the Blind : Accessible Interface and Website Design
Assistive technology to help blind people shop for groceries independently through a website 'clearinghouse' of grocery product images is needed for shopping list prepartion before using an innovative handheld devise (the MoZo box) with computer vision functionality. The user interface for shopping list preparation should be HFES 200 compliant, for those blind users that are web savvy, but also address the needs of the growing population of less computer savvy low-vision elderly individuals who may require a different interface, e.g., based on speech recognition by phone. The grocery product images, indexed by UPC number, should account for both web-available product images from online stores such as Amazon Groceries and Safeway.com, as well as user-contributed product images, and account for the frequently changing nature of product packaging.
This project is a component of the Calit2 GroZi project. One component of the project is a handheld device (the MoZi box) with computer vision functionality including aisle sign reading and product recognition. A downloadable `concept video' for the GroZi project is available.

Community Client: Habitat for Humanity

Green Home Design: Initial building plans for a first ever “green” Environmentally Compliant Home home for construction in San Diego by the UCSD community.

Community Client: UCSD Emergency Medicine

Hospital Hyperbaric Chamber Instrumentation Team members will work with engineers from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) to develop an instrumentation module for the UCSD Medical Center hyperbaric chamber facility. The instrumentation module will gather analog measurements such as temperature, oxygen, carbon dioxide, time, and humidity from the chamber and convert them into a digital format. The digital data will be accumulated and saved onto a computer creating an EMR (Electronic Medical Record) and will be displayed in a graphical system for the operator. By doing this, a personal history for each patient will generated to help determine the efficacy of the treatments. You will be given the opportunity to impact many lives while expanding your experience and knowledge.

Community Client: University of California, San Diego

Campus of the Future: This new project will investigate how information and communications technologies may revolutionize education and campus life at UCSD in the future through mobile phones, GPS technologies, and Web 2.0 technologies.

COMPLETED PROJECTS:

Community Client: Lakeside's River Park Conservancy

Informational Kiosk: The San Diego River has a rich history and compelling biology. An innovative, "green" informational kiosk is being built to communicate the Lakeside Conservancy's progress in making an environmentally-friendly river park. In utilizing an entirely solar powered system, the TIES team hopes to create a kiosk without the need to tether it to the existing power grid, capable of placement along hiking trails, and by using touch-screen technology, enabling people of all ages and levels of computer proficiency to easily access information in the kiosk.
Environmental Monitoring: There is significant need for water quality, as well as biological and aquatic monitoring throughout the length of the river and surrounding habitat. A self-sustained, solar-powered, remote-sensing, low cost water quality system is necessary for the Lakeside Conservancy to monitor the productive changes occurring along their reconstructed piece of the San Diego River. Manual testing has been conducted to ensure that the future monitor is accurate. The prototype hopes to relay the information wirelessly in a user-friendly, web-based application suitable for data manipulation for scientific reports as well as educational applications in local schools.

Bridge design team

Community Client: Lakeside's River Park Conservancy
Duration of project: Fall 2004 - Spring 2006
Description of project: A long-term, large-scale project idea planned for the River Park is to provide hiking and equestrian bridges over Riverford Road, Channel Road, and Highway 67, which bisect the planned trails. Initial engineering, constraints analysis, and design concepts have been produced by the TIES team. A unique, artistic approach to design has been accomplished in collaboration with artist James Hubbell and technical advise by Simon Wong Engineering.
Total number of students involved: 25

Smart Assisted Living Technologies

Community Client: St. Paul's Senior Homes & Services
Duration of project: Fall 2004 - Spring 2007
Description of project: A wearable prototype with an accelerometer and transmitter was designed and developed in order to improve the quality of living of the residents at St. Paul's. Through this smart technologies device, residents are monitored in a non-obtrusive way. The finished product is able to detect falls and send an alert to a central computer station where immediate and appropriate action can be taken by the nurses.
Total number of students involved: 25

Digital Nursing:

Community Client: St. Paul's Project: Digital Nursing
Duration of project: Fall 2004 - Spring 2007
Description of project: In order to monitor the health of the St. Paul's residents, nurses record medical information in a single handwritten binder - the 24 Hour Log. A client/server model was used to create a single database housing all information contained in the log. Customized forms were designed for the system that have been optimized for intuitive and efficient data entry. The TIES team successfully developed, produced and deployed a digital 24 hour log system that is clearer, more succinct, and easier to reference than the current paper based version.
Total number of students involved: 25

Updated: Wednesday, November 14, 2007