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Electrical Engineering<br />
Musical Meditation: Heart Rate-Informed Tempo Modulating Headphones<br />
Tess Fallon, Aleksandr Petukhov, Leonardo Arvan, Madeleine Denis<br />
Music has been shown to have a significant impact on people’s physical and emotional states. In<br />
addition to emotionally hyping us up or calming us down, listening to music can cause actual<br />
physical changes in our bodies. It can raise or lower our blood pressure, impact our breathing<br />
speeds, and even speed up or slow down our heart rates. It has also been demonstrated that<br />
people’s heart rates respond to musical changes in tempo only when the adjustment occurs at a<br />
rate of less than 3% per minute.<br />
We built a heart-rate reactive musical device that aims to help people cope with overstimulation<br />
and/or anxiety. The device is a stand-alone headphone set with capabilities to separate the user<br />
from auditory stimuli. The headphones have a PPG heart rate monitor attached to the earpiece<br />
which will constantly read the user’s heart rate. The headphones will play calming music at an<br />
adjusting rate in an attempt to slow down the user’s heart rate and ease anxiety and<br />
overstimulation. As the user calms down and their heart rate slows, the music will respond and<br />
incrementally decrease in tempo, at a rate no faster than 3% per minute. The goal of the device is<br />
to decrease the user’s heart rate incrementally with music, so that they feel calmer and<br />
experience less of the negative impact of high stress levels and anxiety.<br />
Uninterruptible Power Supply for Home and Kitchen Applications<br />
Malik Hubbard, Ourania Stourati, Maxfield Parson-Scherban<br />
Advisor: Matthias Preindl<br />
Project Description: With the growing threat of climate change leading to more unexpected<br />
weather conditions and natural disasters, electrical power systems around the world are<br />
experiencing increased strain. Many solutions are in development to increase the resiliency of<br />
electrical grids from natural disasters, but most of these solutions focus on large-scale outage<br />
prevention. The uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for home kitchen applications is a power<br />
resiliency solution that focuses on minimizing the effects of a power outage on an individual<br />
home. While most commercial UPS systems are used to protect larger valuable loads like<br />
computer servers, or small private loads like personal computers, this project develops a UPS<br />
specifically for home kitchen applications. Similar to all UPS designs, our system has the ability<br />
to, in the case of a power outage, fall onto a 12V, 54Ah battery pack supply and continue normal<br />
power delivery to an electrical load. Harnessing traditional power electronic DC/DC and DC/AC<br />
converters and our control system, our 1200W UPS is rated for the power requirements needed<br />
for home kitchen appliances. In doing so, our system bridges our electrical design with<br />
commercially mature power delivery practices, to develop a useful and practical device to help<br />
abate the unwanted harms of losing electrical power.<br />
Key Words: electric grid, power electronics, battery pack<br />
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