ECE student helps local school prototype award-winning Smart Jersey

Grainger Engineers are working with our community to build the future. ECE junior Jacob Czyz helped Mahomet-Seymour junior high students build a prototype of their Smart Jersey for the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow competition. In this national competition, 6^th to 12^th grade students work on STEM projects creating innovative solutions for local issues.

The Mahomet-Seymour junior high students designed a Smart Jersey: an athletic shirt that can protect the rib cage and heart from harmful injuries playing sports. The shirt also includes temperature and humidity sensors to track body temperature and hydration. The jersey was selected as the Illinois State Winner for Samsung Solve for Tomorrow, and the school received a $12,000 grant to continue their project. 

As State Winners, the students now had to create a functioning prototype of their design, but they weren’t sure where to start. Their teacher initially reached out to ECE Teaching Associate Professor Yuting Wu Chen, who directed them to Assistant Director of Instructional Support Casey Smith and Margie Carter, Laboratory Manager at the ECE Electronics Services Shop. Margie asked Jacob to take on the project and help the students build their Smart Jersey.

Jacob Czyz has been a student worker at the ECE Electronics Services Shop since his freshman year. Before meeting with the students, he talked to them about their plans for the shirt.

 “Their original idea was pretty broad: they wanted to connect to a phone and show data from the person wearing it,” Jacob says. “I helped them narrow it down and figure out we wanted to measure humidity. After that, I was able to research boards that would be compatible with the sensors.” 

On the prototyping day itself, a group of 14 sixth-grade students visited the ECE Electronics Service Shop to build the shirt prototype. Each student got to try out coding, match the wires on the sensors to the boards, and do some soldering. They used Arduino feather boards and a built-in app to create the prototype Smart Jersey. Sensors attached to the fabric can measure body temperature and humidity and display the data on the app.

Jacob has done other outreach activities through ECE student organization Eta Kappa Nu (HKN), including soldering workshops at the local library for middle and high school students. He comments: “I've always liked outreach events. You're exposing them to a new side of engineering they haven't seen. In middle school and high school, you love being hands on and working on something. For example, the kids were super excited when they were able to change the temperatures from Celsius to Fahrenheit. Just being able to see that is really fulfilling.”