When four Jackson State University engineering students were trying to come up with an idea for their senior project, one of them, Jann Butler, started thinking about his aunt’s loss of her foot three years ago due to diabetes. Butler says her health problems made him aware of the impact of diabetic amputations on entire families and inspired him “to look for a project that would be beneficial to society.” The project team, seniors in JSU’s College of Science, Engineering and Technology, which included two other computer engineering students and one electrical engineering student, researched, planned, designed and finally created an innovative device that could have far-reaching effects.
They developed what the university describes as “a ‘smart mat’ that gauges the foot temperature of diabetics to help thwart the danger of lower extremity amputations—particularly in Mississippi, where the risk is greater, according to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control).”
Jordan Barber, one of the other seniors who worked on the project, said that, for him, the most difficult aspect of the process was the research phase, especially examining all of the products that were on the market to make sure the group wasn’t duplicating something that already existed.
“We were looking for an easy way for patients to see that data and to share that information with their doctor,” Barber explained to Diverse. “We looked at some other studies, and we saw that they used some type of thermometer but the patient had to take the temperature on their own and write the data down and communicate it back to their doctor and we wanted to streamline that.” With the mat, the data were stored and could be shared with the patient and doctor. “One of the things our professor emphasized is that, whatever problem we came up with, something probably already existed [to solve it], so we needed to figure out a way to do it better,” Barber said.
With that in mind, the students decided on the mat (abandoning an earlier idea of “smart slippers” that ran into various design challenges). In addition to the mat, they created a companion Android app to display the data that were being collected.
“We brainstormed and brainstormed,” Butler told Diverse. “That took about two months, then another five months to finish it.” What they came up with was the device that has garnered quite a bit of publicity. Specifically, Butler said, “We developed a mat that diabetic patients could stand on to register the temperature of their feet,” explaining that, if there is a 4-degree difference between two temperatures over a period of time, the lower one would be at greater risk of ulceration.
The other students involved in the creation of the mat, which is still awaiting an official name, were Chevan Baker and Fred Harris, the electrical engineering seniors in the group.
