Melanie Munroe stands with her Engineering Senior Design team's human trafficking tracking device prototype on a busy street at night in Tallahassee. The team was separated by COVID social distancing measures.
FAMU-FSU Engineering student Melanie Munroe and her senior design team SWAY Aid were working hard to meet the demands of creating a Senior Design project prototype when the news of COVID-19 hit the nation. She and her team were working on a vending device to prevent human trafficking when the physical doors to the college were ordered closed to help control the spread of the virus. Munroe and her team suddenly had to adapt to a new way of working together, alone.
“As a senior, I’ve seen FSU’s response to hurricanes before so I knew they would shut the engineering building down indefinitely due to the virus,” Munroe said. “So, I made sure our team members took their technology with them before leaving for spring break.”
Munroe, along with SWAY Aid team members D’Angelo Senat, Mafuor Tanji, Oswaldo Machado and Alina Montoto are working on a device that gives human trafficking victims a way to alert authorities of their situation and whereabouts. The name of their team SWAY Aid is an acronym for Searching Wisely for Adolescents and Youth. When the team got the news of the actual shut down, Munroe said she was afraid they would never be able to remotely deliver what they had promised for senior design.
“I panicked when I heard the school would be shut down,” Munroe said. “I knew there was a lot expected from our team. One of our members even got detained in Colombia, under quarantine. Our adviser, Dr. Shayne McConomy, helped us figure out how to change our goals from building a prototype to focusing on the technology behind it.”
The prototype the team was building is a vending machine that dispenses a disguised GPS tracking device for the victims of human trafficking. McConomy, a teaching faculty member at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, teaches mechanical engineering and advised the team that it was common in companies to outsource parts. He explained that the physical vending machine casing was not their product, it was the technology inside the machine that was important.
“When I met with SWAY to discuss the final expectations of their prototype, they were a little defeated about not completing the vending system,” McConomy said. “I told them to focus on the merits of their work which is the technology.”
By focusing on the technology, the team of students from Florida A&M and Florida State universities hopes to be able to showcase how the system works. The technology behind the system involves fingerprint scanning, GPS tracking and facial recognition software. Munroe is resolved in seeing this through, and explained that everyone has had a part to play in making the project work.
“We are all working on testing and validating the software from home,” Munroe said. “One of our team members has a strong electrical engineering background, and he is working specifically with the GPS and fingerprint scanning subsystem.”
Although Team SWAY Aid had to scale down their original goal, they hope that they can keep working on the project after graduation.
Senat enrolled the project in a Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer course so that the team can apply to receive a federal grant and potentially move the project forward.
“SWAY is among many other teams that have had to make adjustments with working with each other remotely; however, I find this an excellent learning experience,” McConomy said. “Many corporations are spread throughout the United States, and even globally. Working with team members in different locations is a challenge but a necessity.”
More than 300 students are enrolled in the one-year senior design class at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering. Teams typically meet two or three times a week in a lab and are expected to deliver a prototype based on a real-world problem. The class is considered to be a capstone experience for students and is a culmination of all they have learned over the year.
Due to the joint nature of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, blended teams like SWAY Aid are the rule rather than an exception. The college’s senior design teams are typically made up of engineering students from Florida A&M and Florida State universities and often a mix of engineering majors as well.
The challenge of working remotely in the ever-changing environment of COVID-19 is something that former senior design students never had to face but in 2020 senior design teams like SWAY Aid are showing they can rise to the challenge.