ECE 121-001
M3 – Engineering Design Process
Revision: 2
Revision Date: 15-Feb-2025
Engineering Design Process – Athlete Monitoring
The Crimson Tide football program has asked the
Integrated Center for Athletic and Sport Technology
(ICAST – a research unit of
the University of Alabama, to develop proposals for
wearable technologies to support athlete monitoring.
The specific athlete monitoring needs that the team
has identified include:
• Monitor the number and force of impacts to the
head during training and competition;
• Monitor acceleration and maximum speeds
during training and competition;
• Monitor body temperature and environmental
conditions (air temperature and humidity)
during training;
• Monitor water consumption of athletes
throughout practice, games, and their daily
living.
Before the football program financially supports any of the ICAST ideas to develop these
technologies, they have asked for project proposals that outline the design process and
engineering solutions.
As a computer engineer that is on the ICAST team, you have been asked to prepare these details
of the Engineering Design Process (specifically steps 1 through 3) for ONE of the potential
ideas above.
Instructions and Deliverables:
The following instructions and questions are to help guide you through preparing the requested
details. You will upload your answers to each of these questions on Blackboard. While you can
work with a partner to discuss each question, both partners must submit their own answers
written in their own words. For all short-answer questions you must use complete sentences
with appropriate language for the course.
Considering the Engineering Design Process:
1) Referring to the class notes, what are the 7 stages of the engineering design
process? List them all and in your list bold the 3 steps that will be the focus of your
ICAST proposal.
2) Which of the needs from the team will you be applying the engineering design
process for this proposal?
• This will be a multiple-choice question on Blackboard for you to select
ECE 121-001
M3 – Engineering Design Process
Revision: 2
Revision Date: 15-Feb-2025
Focusing on your selected need for the athletes, you must ask critical questions about this
problem and topic area (Step 1 of the engineering design process) so you can better
understand it. To help with this process answer the following questions in complete
sentences:
3) Who are the groups of people that have a stake in this project and the need it
addresses?
Name all the groups of people that you think have a stake in the project to address the
stated athlete need. Remember, stake in this context means they are either directly
involved in making decisions during the process or they are impacted by the
decisions/actions made by others in this process. Be sure to note which category
(decision-maker or impacted) each of your named groups of people belong to.
4) What knowledge already exists about this problem that can help you
understand it further?
Using Google Scholar ( search and report 1 relevant
academic paper that helped you understand this problem.
• For this process, use keywords that are important to your topic for the search.
If Dr. Freeborn was searching for academic papers related to knee injuries in
football the following terms would likely be useful:
o “knee injuries” +football +college
o Do your search while on the UA eduroam wifi network. While
connected to this network, you will get access to academic articles that
you normally have to pay for if you access them off campus (the
University pays a lot of money every year to get students and faculty
this access).
• For your relevant paper, summarize 3 specific pieces of information that you
learned in this article and explain why you think they are useful to the
problem you are working to solve.
• For your relevant paper, provide the citation details so that someone could
easily find this paper later. This requires stating the authors, article title,
journal the article is published in, journal volume, journal number, journal
pages, and publication year.
o Example: The citation details for Dr. Freeborn’s academic paper on
tissue changes due to eccentric exercise are:
§ T.J. Freeborn, G. Regard, B. Fu, “Localized bicep tissue
bioimpedance alterations following eccentric exercise in
healthy young adults,” IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 23100-23109,
2020.
ECE 121-001
M3 – Engineering Design Process
Revision: 2
Revision Date: 15-Feb-2025
5) What are two questions that you have for athletes or the athletic staff about
this project that will help you understand what is needed to make this project a
success?
Next, identify potential solutions (Step 3 of the engineering design process). For this
effort, you’ve been asked to focus on what sensor technologies could be used and the
technical details related to the data they generate.
6) What is one electronic sensor that you think could be used to generate the
digital data needed to solve your athletic monitoring need?
• Provide the name of the sensors, the specific web link to its details, and
explain why you think this sensor and its data could support your specific
need.
o To learn more about available types of sensors, check out SparkFun:
o This is not an exhaustive list though, so you may have to do further
internet searches to learn more about available sensors
• Review the datasheets available for the sensor that you have selected to check
if it has an internal analog-to-digital converter (ADC).
o Upload a screenshot of the sensor datasheet and annotate (e.g. circle or
highlight) the information about the ADC bits.
o If not ADC details are listed, upload a screenshot of the sensor
datasheet that provides the description of how data is output by this
sensor and annotate the parts you think are most important (e.g. circle
or highlight).
• Using the number of bits associated with your sensor and its ADC (or
assuming a 16-bit ADC if your sensor did not have listed details), how much
data would this sensor generate when used by all members of the football
team for a complete season (practices and games) at a sampling rate of 100 Hz
(100 samples per second).
o Upload your clear set of hand-calculations for your answer
o Be sure to clearly write your assumptions related to the number of
players and total time for a football season.
• What type of equipment could this sensor be integrated into for the wearable
monitoring and what body location would it monitor?
o Explain why you think this location of the body is appropriate for your
solution.
ECE 121-001
M3 – Engineering Design Process
Revision: 2
Revision Date: 15-Feb-2025
Considering the harms and ethical problems of this situation:
Beyond the technical solutions it is important to consider the potential harms and ethical
problems associated with this project. And after identifying them, working to create solutions
that address them during the engineering design process.
7) What do you think the ethical problems related to monitoring of college athletes
are?
• When providing your answer, consider that your audience who will read this
has little to no background on this topic. Provide clear explanations with
supporting details from the course so they understand you.
• What information from previous articles that you have read in the course
helped you make these decisions? Be specific about the details and which
article you are referring to (e.g. author and title).
8) What IEEE code of ethic do you think is most relevant to this situation?
9) If more than one IEEE code of ethic is relevant, what do you think is the second
most relevant to this situation?
10) What additional information (if any) would be helpful to clarify what the ethical
problems of this situation are?
11) Name and describe 2 examples of harm related to data use and data privacy in
the context of the project.
• For each harm, note the type of harm it is (using the definitions of harm that
are in the course notes and have been discussed in class).
• For each harm name the group of people that are impacted. Be clear, specific,
and detailed in your answers.
12) What are 2 actions that you could take as a computer engineer on the project to
reduce your previously identified harms?
• In addition to the people who will be impacted by reducing each harm, what other
groups of people may be impacted by these actions and how?
