Cal Poly Engineering students create device to aid visually impaired marching band

As a high school senior in Minnesota, Emma Merriman was flipping through a Cal Poly engineering magazine when an article about the club EMPOWER caught her eye.

Since fall quarter, the mechanical engineering sophomore has led a small team of students in building a device that will help people who are visually impaired compete in marching band.

“​​I’m doing the projects that I saw in those magazines,” Merriman said. “I’m actually helping people in our community live better lives, and it’s so exciting to be able to do that.”

EMPOWER is a student-run nonprofit that uses engineering to improve the quality of life for individuals with physical challenges. The acronym stands for Endeavors to Move People Onward with Engineered Results. 

Two years later, Merriman spends several hours a week in the TECHE Lab, a workshop in the Cal Poly Engineering IV building, accomplishing her goal of participating in EMPOWER and serving the community. 

The team of six students is building headbands to help blind and visually impaired musicians stay in the correct positions while marching. The headbands will be worn under the musicians’ marching band hats. 

Each headband will have four vibration points – on the front, back, left and right – that vibrate when the musician is out of position based on data points communicated through a Bluetooth server, Merriman said. 

The device uses negative feedback; if a musician is too far to the left, the left side of the headband will vibrate, indicating the musician should move to the right. The buzzing technology is called haptics, which Merriman compared to a cell phone vibrating when it receives a notification. 
In recent years, EMPOWER teams have made prosthetics, wheelchairs and other accessibility innovations. However, what Merriman and her team are designing this year is uncharted territory: they were asked by an out-of-state organization to build a feedback system for musicians in a visually impaired marching band.

“Nothing of this magnitude has been done before [at EMPOWER],” Merriman said.

With a large-scale project, one of the team’s biggest challenges is funding.  

According to Merriman, it costs between $135 and $165 to build one device. The team aims to build 27 devices by June. 

The project received $550 from EMPOWER’s club funds, Merriman said. In addition, the music teacher who commissioned the project started a GoFundMe, which has raised $500 as of April 8. That leaves the team between $2,595 and $3,405 short.

Despite challenges with funding, the team has worked to meet EMPOWER’s deadlines throughout the year. They spent winter quarter preparing to present their work to the club’s board members at a design review in March. 

Merriman said she felt optimistic about the presentation afterwards.

“I think we made great progress,” Merriman said. “The board received it well, and I’m starting to see that this project could definitely be finished, which is exciting.”

The project began in Washington – over 1,000 miles north of Cal Poly – when Brent Boon, a retired Boeing employee and current music teacher, had an idea.

Boon teaches music to blind and visually impaired people at the Pacific West Music of the Blind (PWMB), a nonprofit based in Washington. He said he came up with the idea to form a blind and visually impaired marching band while watching a halftime show performance during a football game. 

After talking with dozens of technology companies in the Seattle area about his idea, Boon landed on HaptX, a computer hardware manufacturer in Washington co-founded by engineer Robert Crockett.

In addition to leading HaptX, Crockett is a biomedical engineering professor at Cal Poly and advises Merriman’s team. Crockett said he knew EMPOWER would be a great fit for helping to bring Boon’s idea to life.

“[EMPOWER] specialize[s] in really listening to what the needs are of an individual and creating a solution for that,” Crockett said. 

After Crockett brought the project proposal to the club, Merriman jumped on the opportunity to design the device alongside her team. 

Boon was thrilled that Merriman would be making his dream a reality.

“To have [Merriman] come on board, not only with the technical deftness that she has, but also the people skills to include and incorporate other people’s ideas, is second to none,” Boon said.

The project is one of EMPOWER’s full design projects, meaning the team works on it for a whole academic year. During fall quarter, the team researched technology that would support the motors and sensors, along with design aspects such as comfort and device placement.

With Boon’s help, the team decided on a headband, designed to appear unnoticeable under the musician’s marching band hat.

“I want to make sure their pride is not hurt or damaged at all,” Boon said. “This way it’ll look like any other marching band.” 

RJ Lenhart, one of the band’s prospective musicians, played alto saxophone in high school before losing her sight later on in life. 

Lenhart said she feels that EMPOWER’s device will help draw positive attention toward the blind and visually impaired community.

“If you can get a group of blind people to line up in a row while they are playing drums, that’s incredible,” Lenhart said. “People seeing that’s possible can kind of snap them out of this idea that we can’t do these things.” 

EMPOWER member and computer engineering freshman Chandni Sharma is familiar with Lenhart’s sentiment. In high school gym class, Sharma says she had a friend who was blind; she would hold her friend’s arm while they were playing sports and help her navigate to different places. 

Although her friend was independent, Sharma says she had difficulty getting to specific locations by herself. 

“This kind of technology could help her do that,” Sharma said. 

As the only freshman on the team, Sharma says she was nervous at first to help design the device. However, Merriman saw her perspective as an asset.

“I feel like bringing in people who maybe aren’t the most progressed in their education, but are excited to be there, is the main reason why I chose some of these people,” Merriman said. “Chandni is a great example of that.”

Sharma said she feels lucky to have the opportunity, especially because freshmen are rarely selected for year-long design projects.

“I feel like Emma understands my capabilities, and that’s honestly really amazing, that there’s someone here that has so much faith in me,” Sharma said. “I feel like that’s the main reason that I’ve been able to accomplish what I have so far.”

During spring quarter, the team plans to finish building prototypes and begin testing the devices. Merriman said their goal is to send the devices to Washington in June so the band can start practicing. 

For Lenhart, the fact that Merriman and her team are dedicated to building the device is exciting. 

“Just knowing that some of these things exist makes me feel very happy,” Lenhart said. “I’m really excited just to be a part of it.”