Blast Impact Monitoring System (BIMS)

Overview:

Research suggest that blast impacts to the whole body play a major role in the development of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) amongst soldiers. “While the majority of current studies focus on the direct blast-head interaction, the role of whole-body exposure to blast thus multi-organ response in blast-induced TBI remains underestimated”. TBI is a major problem facing troopers of all militaries. In the United States alone, between the periods of 2000-2014, there have been 307,283 cases of TBI . There remains a need for devices that collect data about these events for both research and early detection of TBI. In 2013 a congressional report stated, “More portable data collection instruments are needed”. The Blast Impact Response System (BIMS) is a system developed as a one-year senior design project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Our objective is to develop a wearable device to be worn by soldiers in the field and upon a blast event, record important information about the blast wave as it impacts the body.

Prototype / Block Diagram:

Our Solution Our Block Diagram

The Team:

  • Marinos Vouvakis
  • Faculty Advisor
  • Andrew Barraford, EE
  • Web Application Architect & Database Access/Storage
  • Josh Ryan, EE
  • Power Systems, Sensor Network & PCB Design
  • Aysha Mehjabeen, CSE
  • Web Application Data Processing & Data Display/IO
  • Fabio Dallorto, EE
  • Signal Processing & File Formatting

Contributors: