2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The traditional idea of capstone teams is assigning a project to a group of students which will be tackled throughout an academic term. The team can be comprised of students from a single major or multi-disciplinary (e.g., multiple majors). The project can span one or two semesters, and, in some exceptions, new teams are tasked with new phases of the project for multiple years [1]. The aim of this work is to present a novel approach to structuring capstone teams. By deconstructing a single project into multi-deliverable components (e.g., heart rate sensor divided into software, hardware and housing) it allows each team to tackle detailed and specific objectives within the span of the academic year. This re-structuring requires some foresight into the main deliverables of the project but does provide the opportunity to attain more fine design objectives than traditional team structures.

The nested-teams were implemented on a project aimed at creating a remote-sensing application for medical monitoring. This application requires students to design a device that can detect vitals to send to a provider. This project was divided into four teams: hardware, software, housing and integration. The hardware team was tasked with acquiring components, building circuitry and understanding the different sensors being utilized. The software team was tasked with building the signal processing, analysis and movement of the acquired data. The housing team was tasked with creating an enclosure that was compliant with the client's needs and hardware/software requirements. Finally, the integration team was tasked with understanding the implementation of the technology and impact to the patient and care team in the clinical setting (e.g., hospital room or patient home). The goal of this restructuring was to recreate a more real-world scenario in which each team in a cohort can work off each other and communicate to achieve their desired outcome. These four teams met twice a week and were required to coordinate communication with both the client and each other to stay on task.

Two main challenges were observed during implementation: communications and ownership. The teams were required to build and sustain clear lines of communication to ensure that specifications were understood by all stakeholders (e.g., communicating the limitations of the sensor). Teams were also required to discuss ownership of design decisions and come to agreements on implementation (e.g., which team decides the implementation of a cooling solution).

[1] Blandino, J., & Hardin, J. (2020, June), An Integrated Multi-year Iterative and Service-oriented Capstone Project Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34131