Hello world,

I just thought I’d introduce myself and tell you a little bit about who I am and my research.  My name is Jason Sylvestre and I am currently a freshman studying Electrical Engineering here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I will be working under Professor Kevin Ponto’s supervision on a project I started last semester for his Wearable technologies class. What I am trying to build is a thermoelectric bracelet that can be used for personal body temperature regulation.  TEB (stands for ‘Thermoelectric bracelet’) can be thought of as a personal air conditioner that can be used to improve thermal comfort.  Research has shown that when you apply a temperature change to a local part of the body, your brain perceives it as a change in your entire body temperature.  It is this psychological effect that I am trying to leverage with my device.

Currently I am in the process of building the second prototype, but once I have a fully functional device and have optimized pulse duration and intensity, I will perform a user study to see if this device actually makes a difference in personal comfort and plan to publish the results.

What I accomplished this week

I just moved all my equipment into my cubicle in the basement at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and began to populate the rev 1.2 PCB with the SMT components. I also gathered a list of supplies needed to complete this second iteration.

Next week’s work

Depending on how quickly Kevin can get me an oven for the soldering procedure, I am going to try to populate the rest of the board. I will also be modifying the code to make use of the hardware interrupts that the buttons are connected to. By utilizing hardware interrupts, there will hardly be any delay now in the program, which was a minor issue with revision 1.1

I look forward to a great semester of research. Thanks

Jason Sylvestre

Below is an image of prototype 1.1