Catherine Graham

In laboratories and design spaces across Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering, students are racing against the clock to put finishing touches on design projects as varied as a self-sterilizing water bottle, a system that uses drones to autonomously track and manage warehouse inventory, and a computer vision-based system that tracks workflow in an operating room.

These projects—more than 150 in all—will be presented to industry sponsors and mentors, faculty members, clinicians, alumni, and fellow students at Tuesday’s Design Day, an annual event that showcases students’ abilities to translate theoretical knowledge into practical and creative solutions to real-world problems.

The concept of a “design day” began 35 years ago in the Department of Mechanical Engineering but has now grown to include all nine Hopkins Engineering departments, as well as the Center for Leadership Education.

“Design Day is a celebration of our undergraduate and graduate students’ innovation, creativity, and energy,” said Ed Schlesinger, dean of the Whiting School.

For one of the projects, faculty from the Johns Hopkins Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine asked mechanical engineering students to devise a solution to a serious problem they see too often in the emergency room: riding lawnmower-related injuries to children. Common reasons these life-changing injuries occur is because a running child slips under a mower, a parent reverses the mower and doesn’t see a child, or a child falls off the mower when riding on a parent’s lap.

“While we knew the main causes of these injuries, our biggest challenge was that we don’t know exactly how these injuries happen in real time,” said Garrett Ung, a senior mechanical engineering major. “Recordings of these accidents as they happen obviously aren’t available, so we had to go based on our research and consider different scenarios.”

Working with Ung on the project are seniors Natalie Myers, Rafael de la Tijera Obert, Tommy Liang, and junior Aloysius Teng.

“In the beginning, we probably threw 30 ideas at the problem, just to find one that even had a shot at preventing lawnmower injuries. We just had to keep working through ideas, as practical or wild as they were,” Myers said.

The team developed two safety mechanisms that address the most commons causes of lawnmower injuries: a computer-vision sensor on the rear of the lawnmower that can detect a child and send a signal to stop the lawnmower, and a safety guard that prevents children from getting too close to the blades should they fall off a parent’s lap.