Check-y

Hi everyone!

It’s with sadness that I write this last blog post from the Shockeys…

What a year have we spent together!

We have reached Milestone 5 with pride! We were able to show our working PCB as well as the final design of our headband. Of course, we are far from a perfect product, nevertheless with the time we had at our disposal and the coronavirus situation, we are all pleased with what we have achieved!

Thus, the CHIC program with the full team has ended…but let me explain our journey again.

We started in October with the creation of the Resourceful team. I was absent, and I only discovered the full squad after the kick-off weekend. But, we rapidly got along with each other! From the start, we planned weekly meetings to establish a good work dynamic.

Our first challenge was to choose an opportunity. We all agreed to work on something helpful and not “just another gadget”. We explored many ideas, and after a lot of interviews in the medical field and sports, we realized that concussions are a real issue. The more we investigated, the more we understood how bad the existing approach was at detecting concussions, and the more we were convinced we could change this! So we arrived at milestone 1 to present our opportunity space.

Once our opportunity was chosen and well defined, we still needed to find the best solution for our problem. We thought about many different ideas, and some were really crazy (eggs?). Nevertheless, thanks to the positive atmosphere in our team, even the craziest ideas were considered. After thorough market research, literature review, and more interviews, we concluded that the best way to detect shocks was by using a headband under the helmet. We finally presented our solution at milestone 2, where our supervisors seemed really happy!

With this positive feedback in mind, we jumped into the design phase of our product. We continued to work on our MVP we had started during our trip at Champery, where we had done some early prototyping. Marine was working hard to find the best design, Nicolas was considering different business models, and all three engineers were working on the firmware architecture. We had a solid overview of our product to show at milestone 3!

Now things began to accelerate, as we only had two months left to finish everything. We assigned a duty to each engineer. Maëlick was responsible for the software, Diane for the firmware, and Taavet for the hardware. Marine and Nicolas continued to work on the design and the business plan, respectively. Our motivation was flying high until the pandemic hit Europe… It was hard. All hockey clubs had to close, and we could no longer carry out any tests or get feedback from our end-users. Worse, we couldn’t even work altogether, and many manufacturing services were down. It was a hard period for the Shockeys, and motivation started dwindling. Nevertheless, we learned how to work differently with the imposed constraints. We pushed through, and we managed to show a convincing design as well as the schematic of our first PCB at milestone 4.

The final stretch before the last milestone. The team got its original motivation back, and we made huge progress in all areas of the project. We also took the time to create our logo. After some brainstorming, we chose the woodpecker as our symbol because it’s an animal often used in research about concussions. Thus we were ready for Milestone 5.

So it is the end of our story…or is it? No!

It’s maybe the end of our story as a full team, but the engineers will continue to improve our prototype in September during a summer school in Switzerland! * Cry of despair in Cantonese… *

Thanks for following our journey and stay tuned for more after the summer break!

The Shockeys

Hi everyone!

We hope you’re all doing well. It was another productive week for the Shockeys.

We met twice as a team to work on our logo, color palette, and branding. Choosing the values we want to associate with as a brand is tough. We’re trying to find the best trade-off between a clean and minimalist Medtech identity and a more sporty and combative vibe.

Our first PCBs and some additional components already arrived on Friday! Taavet is going to hand solder some missing parts and will be able to test our functionalities before Milestone 5.

Last but not least, all three engineers met on Zoom with Prof. Schmid, Taavet and Diane’s supervisor. We mainly discussed our progress for the engineering part of the project during the past few weeks. He also gave us so much useful advice for the firmware architecture.

The pressure is increasing as we really want to wrap up everything before Friday. We hope we’ll be able to finish all that must be done before the milestone.

Take care, and see you next week for our last post of the semester!

The two past weeks since MS4 were very productive for the Shockeys team.

On the engineering side, Maëlick has been actively working with his supervisor, Dr. Benjamin Ricaud, to find the best functions to extract the impacts from our mock measurements with our work-like prototype. Taavet tweaked some last things on our PCBs based on the technical feedback he received and his discussions with Marine, our designer. Our first PCBs are now on their way to Switzerland! Diane has been trying to merge all functionalities we developed separately for our device under the helmet using Bluetooth.

The design of our product is almost done. Marine is now focusing on technical details, as well as our first look-like prototype, with the help of a professional.

On the MID side… no, we don’t have a MID. On the other hand, we do have a versatile businessman. Nicolas was able to release this week a first mock-up of our app, thanks to Adobe XD. This allowed us to have the first glimpse of it and further refine our desired design and functionalities.

That’s it for us! See you next week 🙂

Hello to all Shockeys’ followers!

We’re happy to announce that Milestone 4 is behind us and that it went well. We were able to present our current design made by our industrial designer, Marine. We also described our current business model, which is basically a one-time payment for a basic app for the parents and a subscription model for the complete app, which targets the coaches. Taavet worked a lot to make our first PCBs. We are also now able to connect more than one headband to the router, which wasn’t easy, but Diane made it possible. Maëlick learned a lot on databases and started to process some mock signals.

Thanks to the team of professors involved in this project, we had a lot of feedback, which will help us to improve our product.

Today, we planned the next steps to be ready for MS5, which is less than 4 weeks ahead!! We’re strapping ourselves in for some rollercoaster weeks.

See you soon for some more news from us!

Stay safe!

Hello all CHIC followers !

Working has got you down ? Us too !!!

We’ve been trying our best to meet the goals we all set for us in these trying times but it’s only getting harder. 

With the lack of information, the limited access to tools and the future plans of EPFL to not open up, we got the blues of work and this of course has affected the advancements of our project. 

Milestone 4 is coming up this Friday and we got to “Zoom” together and talked about our design identity, our colors and the wireframe of our app. 

We brainstormed on the colors we wanted to show on our logo and on our app without disturbing the user. Our final conclusion was white and blue ! Marine will work with this and we’ll soon be able to see our magnificent logo in all its glory. 

Stay safe, healthy and don’t forget to rest if you have the time…because we sure don’t !

The Shockeys

Hi everyone!

This week was rather relaxed as all five team members are technically on Easter break. Yet, we all know that the CHIC program never really pauses. Therefore, we continued to work on the project.

All three engineers met online on Thursday morning for a quick update and debugging session.

Maelick has created our team account to use the database services offered by Google. He has a hard time understanding how it works. Hopefully, the MOOC he started on Coursera will help him to make sense of the interface.

Diane has been working on the code to allow two « helmets » to communicate with our router and make sure that not a single data package is lost!

Taavet is catching up with the recordings of the workshops on PCB design held by Raffael.

That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for next week’s update, and don’t forget to wash your hands!

The Shockeys

Hi everyone,

The Shockeys hope you’re doing well at home and that you had a good Easter!

We believed that five motivated students, working on an incredible project, with a perfect cohesion, would be invincible. Sadly, reality hit us hard. Communication with hockey clubs went out of the window, and thus, all the MVP testing has become impossible. It had a significant impact on our project as we rely a lot on real data to move to the next stage. Moreover, testing our prototype would have turned tangible all the effort we’ve put into this project and strengthen its trustworthiness. Nevertheless, the team is still working! We’re not discouraged, and after a short break on the engineering part, we are back stronger!

Marine has never stopped working and has designed different prototypes that look amazing, check out the picture of the post ;)As mentioned, the engineers are back, and we’re working on the software and the firmware, as both require very few equipment.

Moreover, the team gathered on Friday for a crisis meeting to prepare Milestone 4. We now have a better overview of the following weeks. We will also attend workshops on PCB design during the “Easter break” to strengthen our skills.

Stay tuned for our next update; we’re back!

The Shockeys

Hi everyone!

We hope you’re all healthy and at home during these unusual times.  

Due to the current situation, the CHIC project has been put on hold for all EPFL and HEC students.

However, this is not the case for ECAL students, even though their campus also closed. Marine will, therefore, have to continue the design part of the project, without materials and machines. She will definitely have to be super creative to cope with this lack of resources ^^’.

Despite this, our engineers were still able to discuss with Raffael and Marc on Tuesday using Zoom. They got a lot of useful feedback that will help us during the next steps of our project.

On Friday, we had Milestone 3 by video conference, during which we presented all the work done since MS2. We also reflected on the impact of coronavirus on our project. And, let’s be real. It hit us hard, and many things are now impossible or very complicated to do. As a result, we had to postpone some of our plans but, even if our project is on hold until April 19th, it’s still alive! Don’t worry, we’ll let you know as soon as things change and we will try to work a bit on the app in the meantime.

All the team sends you its positive vibes!

Stay at home and take care,

The Shockeys

Hello, dear followers of the CHIC Projects!

The Shockeys are working hard on Milestone 3 to give the best overview of our device.  

Diane and Taavet had a long talk with their supervisor, Professor Schmid, about the WHOLE architecture of the device and the possibility of not having access to everything we have now in China if we go there (#thanks Corona).

Maelick did a thorough analysis of the data recorded by our device and is looking at the right way to do it on board.

Nicolas looked for the best place to store the data from the device. We are looking into the Switch Drive, which is a Swiss server service that already hosts a lot of EPFL’s data. So, pretty safe!

Marine is trying to find the right design for the device while the engineers keep changing the location of the sensors to get optimal data.

With everything moving around and getting canceled, we would like to wish you a lovely week, a good rest because of the cancellations, and safe travels wherever you go.

See you next week for a new update !!!

The Shockeys

Hi everyone!

The past weeks have been tough for the world as the outbreak of coronavirus is spreading across the world and has hit Switzerland. Thankfully, the Shockeys are all healthy, and we continue to thrive as an energetic and motivated team!

As we’re working on our MVP, a lot of design and technical questions must be solved. Of course, the MVP is not a perfect version of our product, but we intend to create the most accurate and useful prototype for hockey players. Thus, we took more time to think carefully about technical aspects such as the battery, data transfer, and storage.

Taavet had quite a hard time dealing deal with the data storage part. Yet, he made it through, and we now have a functional system where everything is correctly saved. No data should now be lost.

Marine is working with flexible and hard PCBs to create a comfortable device. She is also thinking about the best way to avoid any user discomfort due to the more bulky and hard elements (battery, ESP32, and SD cards).

In parallel to all of this work, Nicolas is doing some networking. Indeed, as we are advancing fast in our project, we want to test our MVP on real ice rinks, and to do so, we are contacting hockey teams.

We hope to have a functional MVP for next week! So stay tuned on social media for more updates and exciting results.

The Shockeys.

Hi everyone!

Last week was really packed with Milestone 2 and the lift-off weekend. This week was a bit lighter for our team. Marine is (finally!) enjoying her holidays. The four other members of the team started their spring semester at HEC Lausanne for Nicolas and EPFL for the three engineers.

We still managed to meet on Thursday morning. The set-up was a bit hybrid between digital and physical (the three engineers were at EPFL and connected to Marine in Toulouse and Nicolas in Vevey with Zoom). We were able to define our team’s roadmap for the next four weeks leading to the … (you’ve guessed it 😉 ) Milestone 3 !

On Monday, we also had the confirmation of the engineers’ supervisors. We are really thankful for their enthusiasm for our project, and we will do our best to meet their expectations!

As we’re diving deeper into the prototyping phase, we now clearly divided the work to be done (especially in the engineering part). To sum up:

• Marine is working on the Industrial Design and User Experience dimensions of our project.
• Nicolas is focusing on the business perspective and will also help Marine work on the User Experience.
• Taavet is in charge of the hardware part and is supervised by Prof. Alexandre Schmid.
• Diane is responsible for the communication and firmware part. She is also supervised by Prof. Alexandre Schmid.
• Maelick is in charge of the software and signal processing part. He’s supervised by Dr. Benjamin Ricaud.

We can’t wait to see how our prototype will evolve during the semester.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for next week’s update!

Hi everyone !!!

The ResourceFul team has just evolved into ……. the Shockeys !!!

This week has been super productive for the team. Real environment testing, hardware making, and design thinking. 

The second milestone brought us plenty of insights !!! A lot has been done, but we still have so much on our plate. We want to thank all the experts that gave us their inputs on our ideas and how to further improve them. They showed us how to change our mindset to bring more to the users while preserving their privacy, both online and offline. 

The start of the semester gave us many things to think about, and you’ll soon be updated about our next big moves!

The Shockeys 

Hi everyone!

This week was really fun for everybody on the team! We were on holiday, but we managed to work on our project, and actually, we made a lot of progress.

We completed the Wifi communication between two ESP32s. This was performed by Diane, who was under a coconut tree on a Caribbean Island. Indeed, the Resourceful team can work anywhere. We still need to test the communication in a crowded environment, but this is our challenge for next week.

Last week, we bought a conformal coating spray. So this week, we tested it on a simple IMU. After two hours in a salty bowl of water, the coating was still protecting the sensor. Thus, it comforts our choice to keep this technology as a barrier against sweat.

Next week is Milestone 2, and we are still following our schedule, so stayed tuned for next week as we will arrive strong!

Hi everyone!

Some news from the RessourceFul team 😀

Now that most of us are on holiday, we can work full time on our idea. But when we are on holiday, it’s hard for us to meet physically, so we had our first fully digital meeting.

We also ordered our first products. We will now be able to test a spray to make our electronics waterproof. Indeed, as ice hockey players sweat during games, we don’t want any problem with that.

Our engineers will also work on the communication. We have bought the hardware we need and they will now work on the software part.

We’re also trying to refine our customer segment to make the most suitable product and then come with a business plan.

Wish us good luck with all the work we need to do before mid-February.

Stay tuned, and see you next week!

Hi everyone!

This week, the Resourceful team managed to meet twice  (insert small victory dance!).

On Wednesday, we went to the final of the ice hockey men’s tournament of the 2020 Lausanne Youth Olympic Games. It was the first time attending a live ice hockey match for some members of the team and what an inspiring moment! Watching these young talented athletes race through the ice rink at such speed was truly mesmerizing.

Keeping our product in mind, it was also very instructive to see what type of shocks the players experience during such high-stake games. Ice hockey players were not tender, but thankfully, no player was seriously injured. However, it seems that one Russian athlete endured an impact on the head at the beginning of the match. He was immediately replaced by another player. We also did some spectral analysis to understand how the Wifi channels were occupied. As expected in such a packed stadium, we identified many networks. The app we used to detect Bluetooth devices even saturated!

On Thursday, we met again.  This time, we chose a calmer environment to redefine our agenda for the following weeks with milestone 2 just around the corner on February 15th! With the winter break starting in a few days, our schedules will be even more all over the place, but we found a way to make it work.

The following weeks are definitely going to be really interesting for our project as we have to come up with all the technical requirements and specifications in less than 3 weeks.

We’re looking forward to sharing our progress with you. So stay tuned and see you next week!

Hi everyone!

It’s been a while since we’ve posted a blog post. We took that time to recharge by spending quality time with our respective families during Christmas. But now, it’s time to go back to work!

We met for the first time in 2020 on January 10th. During this meeting, we reflected on our first semester of work and discussed how to make the most of our weekly meetings. We generally agreed that we’re in a good dynamic, and we should continue in this direction.

Our next objective is milestone 2, where we plan to present a low tech prototype. To do so, we are currently working on a survey for young hockey players in order to be as close as possible to their needs.

Fun fact of the week: Did you know that the head is the most efficient part of the body for heat transfer? Indeed, it’s on the top of our head that we have the most sweat glands. That’s why you sweat so much when wearing a helmet!

We are thrilled to continue this adventure and stay tuned for more!

The Resourceful team.

Hello Everyone,

We have arrived at the end of the semester but our project continue! Indeed one of our robotic engineers have already designed a little prototype of an accelerometer. If you have followed our path until now, you should know that it will be our main sensor for the project.

We also have done a little statement of our journey and we are proud of how it has advanced. Of course, there is still a lot of work and that’s why we have planned the future months:

• How can we create the best device by maximizing the comfort for hockey player?
• Can we achieve a good autonomy for the battery?
• What is the best way to send data from the device to the medical team?

This is the kind of challenge we will face in the next months.

To answer some of them, it will be prototype time! Marine will ensure that engineers create something wearable and the engineer will face the challenge to create something compatible. Of course, Nicolas need to prepare a real business plan but he will also help us in the process of prototyping, especially because it’s fun 🙂

Stay tuned for the beautiful devices who will arrive soon

The resourceful team

Hi everyone!

Time flies with the semester coming to an end. It’s already time for an update from the Resourceful team.

We kicked off the week with Mass Challenge. We pitched our chosen solution in 10 minutes to a panel of experts with very different backgrounds. We are grateful for the valuable feedback we received!

During our team debrief, we went through all the points mentioned during the Q&A session and discussed how we could implement these suggestions.

Like every week, we also met on Thursday. We redefined the most critical assumptions for our solution to work. Over the weekend, we are going to think about how we could test each of them using low-fidelity prototypes.

Stay tuned to find out what we are going to come up with !

Hi everyone!

 Last weekend, we decided to take team-bonding to the next level. We all went to Champéry for the weekend. It was a unique opportunity to spend some quality time together around a delicious Swiss-style raclette. We also did an escape room and a short walk in the mountains.
Our accommodation was located in front of the Palladium where a junior hockey competition was held! So we went there to analyze the young players in real-time. We also spent some time working on MassChallenge Switzerland, which will take place this Monday!
In a nutshell, it was really an unforgettable weekend, and these bonds that we strengthened will definitely help us during our project.

 Furthermore, we interviewed this week a sports doctor who kindly received us and confirmed our assumptions. We also discussed on Skype with a biomedical engineer, who is a senior researcher at the Swiss Concussion Center. His expertise was extremely helpful in understanding how complex concussions are. His valuable comments allowed us to confirm some of our hypotheses and finally pick the best solution for our opportunity.

 Thanks for reading us. See you next week!

Dear ResourceFul’s fans,

On Monday, we had an ideation workshop, and we came up with loads of solutions. During this workshop, we were supposed to draw every idea that came to our mind, and we were pretty productive. The next step was to group them by theme.

We had the following categories:

• Monitor shocks via sensors integrated to the neck protection,
• Monitor impacts via a balaclava under the helmet,
• Monitor shocks via a device fixed around or in the ear,
• Film the match and then use algorithms to check how violent were the impacts,
• Use the deformation to know how strong was the shock,
• Implant a chip under the skin directly on the skull,
• Design a mouthguard with built-in sensors,
• Add a detector directly on the helmet to monitor the head acceleration,
• …

We spent our week thinking about those ideas. During our weekly meeting, we shared our different arguments against or in favor of each approach.

Finally, after an hour of discussion, we chose two ideas which, from our point of view, are the best ones. The problems with the others were, among others, how difficult it can be to get some medical authorizations, as well as the lack of precision (for the neck solution and device on the helmet).

Next week, we will contact the Swiss Concussion Center, prepare two surveys for the kids and their parents, and look for useful sensors for our device.

Be sure to read our next blog post for some exciting news!

Hi everyone!

The Resourceful team brings you the latest news.

It’s done! We survived milestone number one! Together, we presented our project to our supervisors and other members participating in the CHIC program. Even our mentor Nicolas came for the occasion!

During Thursday’s weekly meeting, we took into account the comments and questions about our project and our presentation to further refine our opportunity. We decided to focus on concussions in young athletes playing sports such as hockey. In a nutshell, we have found the following opportunity: “How might we monitor head impacts sustained by young hockey players in order to preserve their brain health?”

Moreover, we did two new interviews this week. One of them is an interview with a youth hockey coach who is also a retired professional hockey player, and our second guest was a kickboxer.

Question: Do you know the difference between a Knock-out and a Knock-down, in the kickboxing world? A knockout is the term used when a practitioner is knocked down by a blow but does not get up within 10 seconds. A Knock-down is when the participant receives a blow, falls, and gets up.

That’s all for today!
Stay tuned for more updates on our project.

Hi everyone!

This is it. Tomorrow is the D-day: Milestone 1!

Report. Check.

Appendix. Check.

Presentation’s story. Check.

Slides deck. Work in progress.

As expected, this week was super busy. It started on Monday with a great pitching workshop led by Benedict Stalder. We pitched our idea for the first time, and we’re not gonna lie …  it was rough! But we always need to start somewhere. We took into account all the feedback he provided us and hope to nail our Milestone presentation on Friday.

Throughout the week, we also interviewed two additional experts and one potential user. These discussions were definitely inspiring and full of insights. We also met our CHIC mentors. It was great to hear their take on their CHIC journey. We are so grateful for their time and help!

We’re excited (but also a bit nervous, we must admit) to be tomorrow to share our progress with our professors and the other teams.

That’s all the updates for now. Stay tuned to learn how our 1st Milestone went!

Hi everyone!

What’s new in the Resourceful team?

We interviewed several people to choose which field we will explore during the next steps. We decided to work on concussions. We had the opportunity to discuss with a physiotherapist who works very closely with professional athletes.

We also got in touch with our mentors. We scheduled an appointment (the ones with beers ^^) to meet them and talk about our project. We hope they will give us some useful tricks and advice to help us with the next steps.

The first milestone is getting closer and closer… We still have a lot on our plate with many tasks to complete before next Thursday. But we’re still extremely motivated and want to do our best!

Good luck to the other teams and see you soon for more news!

The Resourceful Team

Hi everyone!

Last week, we brainstormed a lot and chose eight ideas to explore further. Each of us had the responsibility to present one or two topics. 

This week, we presented our little research and proceeded to a quick vote in order to eliminate subjects too complex to work on. Three ideas were retained. It was easy to discard another one, but two were still standing…So, what are they?

– Concussion-detection in sports or other activities.

– Help patients perform their occupational therapy activities.

We couldn’t agree on which one we wanted to choose, not because we were divided among them, but because the two are attractive and everyone wants to work on them.

So what now?

Interviews!

We will ask experts to help us in this process, and we hope that after interviewing them, we will be able to choose the best opportunity. So this sets our goals for next week.

We also had a workshop on the weekend on team management! We created a team contract to define our teams’ goals, work and meeting norms, as well as our decision-making process. It will definitely come in handy in the unfortunate event of a team crisis. We also explored different aspects of teamwork with role-playing games and tower construction. And most importantly, we had fun!!

So overall, it was a great week for the Resourceful team. Be sure to stay connected with us, more is coming!

Hello everyone! Resourceful at your service!

This week, the Resourceful team took part in a project management workshop at EPFL to plan ahead and see what could and will be the challenges we will face during CHIC.

The main challenge you guessed it….will be TIME !!! But for now, we have plenty of it, and we intend to make the most out of it. To search, to ask, to question, to meet and talk. Even though the team was spread across two different countries, we were able to speak with Marine in France and the rest of us at EPFL through Zoom!

There were some disagreements on what to work on, but everyone in the team agreed on one thing: we want to make something useful! No gadget, no toy. But something that will improve lives.

With a lot of brainstorming, we came up with 8 ideas we will pursue to finally choose one that we genuinely believe in.

This has been Resourceful, and have a great weekend!

Hi everyone!

We are the “Resourceful” team, and we’re thrilled to join the CHIC community.

We’re a multidisciplinary team of five extremely motivated students:

• Marine Fondin, ECAL student in Industrial Design
• Taavet Kangur, EPFL student in Robotics
• Diane Marquette, EPFL student in Robotics
• Maëlick Brochut, EPFL student in Life Science
• Nicolas Mauroux, UNIL student in Information Systems

During the kick-off, we enjoyed meeting the whole cohort of this edition. It was an intense weekend with many brainstorming sessions, team building, and first pitches. One of the thematics that emerged – and with it, our team – was resources and how we use them.

We look forward to digging deeper into this critical issue. We can’t wait to keep you posted on our journey!