Adaptive Adventures, a nonprofit that helps people with disabilities participate in outdoor sports, identified a challenge with monitoring skin temperature for the veterans with amputations they had groups with. In cold environments, users and instructors needed a way to detect potentially unsafe skin temperatures quickly. Existing approaches, such as temperature-monitoring socks, could be difficult to put on, remove, and keep securely in place.

Our senior design team of four was tasked with developing a wearable prototype that could continuously monitor skin temperature and alert both the athlete and their instructor when temperatures became too low.

I served as the lead backend engineer, taking ownership of the application's backend architecture, database design, APIs, and deployment. I designed and implemented the cloud infrastructure using Amazon Web Services, with AWS Lambda and API Gateway serving as key components for communicating between the mobile application and backend.

I also contributed to the Android application, which was built in Android Studio using Java, helping with both its design and implementation. On the hardware side, I researched potential technologies and approaches to support the team's hardware decisions, although I was not directly responsible for building or testing the hardware.

The team developed a proof-of-concept system consisting of an Arduino Nano 33 BLE, temperature sensor, battery supply, and radio module housed in a compact case that could be secured around an extremity with Velcro. Temperature data was transmitted to our Android application and backend, where it could be accessed and shared between athletes and their instructor.

We presented the project in May 2023 as part of our senior design showcase. Our project placed in the top three among all senior design projects in our graduating class. While the project was ultimately a prototype rather than a production deployment, it demonstrated how a wearable sensor, mobile application, and cloud backend could work together to address a real accessibility challenge.

The visual map for the Android app workflow and possible screens

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