Team Catnap Wins DifferenceMaker Francis College of Engineering Prototyping Competition
Image by Ed Brennen
12/21/2022
By Ed Brennen
More than 25 million Americans have asthma, including nearly 2 million children under the age of 12, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2020, more than 4,000 people in the U.S. died from asthma attacks.
Children who suffer an asthma attack while sleeping are particularly vulnerable, as their parents may not know they’re in distress.
A team of UMass Lowell students is trying to address this problem with an oxygen-sensing device called Catnap — a project that won the ninth annual DifferenceMaker Francis College of Engineering Prototyping Competition, held recently at University Crossing.
Biomedical engineering majors Fritznere Brutus, Khadija El Hadad, Michael Ciampo, Majd Elhachem and Matheus Fonseca earned the first-place prize of $2,500 and will automatically advance to April’s preliminary pitch-off for the DifferenceMaker $50K Idea Challenge.
“It feels amazing to see our hard work and determination pay off,” says Elhachem, who celebrated with teammates after accepting the first-place check from Dean of Engineering James Sherwood.
A first-year student from Andover, Massachusetts, Elhachem says he was inspired to create the device after learning that his great grandfather died from a nocturnal asthma attack.
Image by Ed Brennen
“It’s amazing to me that that’s not already out there on the market,” says Mark Saab ’81, ’13 (H), who judged the final round with fellow engineering alumni Chad LaFrance ’92, Greg Sydney ’81 and Mike Rider ’87.
“I’ve judged a lot of these competitions,” Saab adds, “and I thought this year we probably saw the largest number of really good projects that could all potentially make it to the market.”
Twenty-two teams applied for this year’s Prototyping Competition, which challenges students to turn an idea into an actual product, whether it’s a mechanical device, software application or integrated system. After two hours of poster presentations to nine preliminary-round judges, six teams advanced to the finals, where they had five minutes to pitch their product.
Image by Ed Brennen
Liang, a first-year student from Boston, says he applied for the competition at the last minute after seeing an email from DifferenceMaker.
“It’s incredible that I can have this opportunity as a freshman — and that it might turn into something,” says Liang, who is head of manufacturing for the Design, Build, Fly Club and a member of the Drone Club. “It’s actually hitting a market need that’s super-important.”
RehaBand, an adjustable resistance band that a person can wear to recover from muscle atrophy, finished in third place and won $1,000. The team includes biomedical engineering majors Alexa DeVito, Maria Ferreira, Helen Kham, Timothy Roach and Ardon Zibel.
Image by Ed Brennen
Lethycia Sanchez, a sophomore environmental engineering major from São Paulo, Brazil, says she enjoyed developing a solution to a problem with classmates from different engineering disciplines. She worked with mechanical engineering majors John Monsen and Emily LaBelle and plastics engineering major Jack Sullivan on Filamill, a machine that would turn recycled plastic in 3D printer filament.
“Everyone has different perspectives from their different classes, and we all help each other connect with our different areas of expertise,” says Sanchez, who looks forward to taking the project to the “next level” at the $50K Idea Challenge in the spring.