Georgia Institute of Technology Materials Science and Engineering

The team Recreational Sleepers took top MSE honor at 2022 Capstone Design Expo, held Tuesday, April 26, at McCamish Pavilion. More than 200 student teams competed in the Expo.

This semester’s 218 teams spanned four colleges — Engineering, Computing, Design, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts — and 12 schools. Seven disciplines within engineering were represented: aerospace, biomedical, electrical and computer, industrial and systems, materials science, mechanical, and nuclear and radiological.

MSE had 10 teams competing and six interdisciplinary teams that included MSE members. Recreational Sleepers, consisting of Cameron King, Dio Oey, Lakshmi Panchumarti, Elijah Tan, Thomas Thwaite, and Wendi Wu, received the top MSE prize. Their project, sponsored by Serta Simmons Bedding, addressed overheating while sleeping on memory foam by designing a sustainable solution to provide increased cooling to the sleeper. “Our team was really interested to work with the consumer product side of a company to create something that people will actually use,” said Cameron King of Tyrone, GA. “It was a great experience working with the sponsor to get their expertise and see them get excited about the ideas we presented about creating a sustainable layer for their mattresses.”

The 2022 Prize for Best Overall Project went to the interdisciplinary team, Tired Techies, who created a sleep-monitoring mask and smart alarm that reduces drowsiness by waking the sleeper during the correct sleep cycle. The device measures eye movement throughout the night and processes the data to classify sleep stages.

See the complete list of 2022 Capstone winners here.