Award took place in the ISCAS 2023 conference, the main conference from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), in Monterrey, California, in the United States
Photo: Divulgation
The students Vitor Balbinot Zanini, Lucas Dutra Luza and Bernardo de Freitas Farinon, from the Computer Engineering Degree Program from PUCRS’s School of Technology won the international stage of the Student Design Competition, promoted by IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), facing champions from North America; Europe and Africa; and Asia and Oceania. Over the course of 2022, the students, along with their classmates Vinicius Rocha Miranda Souza and Rijckard Vizzenzo Rommel, developed the project to participate in this competition, in which undergraduate students must create projects of circuits and systems to solve real-life problems.
The project developed by the three students was based on the Lei Lucas law (13722/18), created after a child choked to death during a school field trip and that stipulates that teachers and staff from public and private establishments of primary education and children’s recreational activities must be trained in basic notions of first aid.
“The law is still not often applied in Brazil and regulatory bodies don’t monitor its enforcement. Our project intends to create a prototype of a low-cost electrical circuit to help lay people to perform the Heimlich maneuver (maneuver used to treat choking)”, explains professor Rafael Garibotti, one of the project’s advisors.
With three stages total, the first one was held in December 2022 in the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), where the students presented a demonstration of the prototype to a board. Once approved, they continued on to the second stage, where they represented the state of Rio Grande do Sul with the creation of a paper and a video presenting the project and its applicability. In it, professor from PUCRS’s School of Health and Life Sciences and nurse Ana Figueiredo showed how the Heimlich maneuver is performed traditionally.
See it here: CASS Student Design Competition – PUCRS Team
