CSE477 Project Suggestions

Project ideas to serve as starting points:

1. Virtual Neighbor: Many devices commonly found or easily installed in a home could keep a virtual eye on an elderly relative. For example, motion sensors, door/window sensors, thermostats, and microphones could be perform monitoring functions and report unusual situations. Examples are lack of motion or a door left open during the night. The interesting part of this project is to create an architecture that makes it trivial to add/remove sensors and provide a smoothly varying quality-of-service.
2. Location Tracker: Use GPS (for outdoors) and RF (for indoors) to track the locations of people and objects. Spftware applications could  use this information to deliver location-dependent content or dialogs to a users. A simple example would be a locating a printer nearest to the user's current location.
3. Campus Navigator: Instrument a PDA with GPS and a campus map, to allow the PDA to show precise directions to a building location.
4. Police/Fire/EMT Mapping: Emergency service workers would like to receive maps of their destination prior to their arrival on a scene. Use GPS and a PDA to provide location-dependent street or building maps.
5. Digital Pill Box: Mobile box that keeps track medication, dosages, and when the patient actually takes their medicine. Also automatically orders refills when the prescription is nearly used up.
6. Electronic Badge: Mobile user-identity tag that allows remote sensors to unlock doors for authorized users, or sound an alarm for unauthorized room access.
7. Measuring Body Motion: Use accelerometers and distance ultrasonic rangefinders to measure body motion, and transmit this information to a motion tracker.
8. Preferences Holder: A portable device that holds personal preference information, and transmits this information (wireless RF) to set room temperature, log onto a computer, set auto radios, etc.
9. Chording Keyboards: There should be a middle ground between pen-based Graffiti and QWERTY keyboards for entering text. Construct an optimized chording keyboard that presents a quick menu of choices for a user to select with a stylus. Huffman coding may be a way to start. The screen space occupied by the menu would be smaller than a keyboard and could be ideal for a PDA.
10. Mobile profile: A mobile appliance that monitors your computer usage, and allows you to move from one computer to another and effortlessely pick up your work where you left off.
11. Motion detector: A security appliance that sounds an alarm when it detects sufficient motion in a video scene.
12. Competitive game over ethernet: Build a game to compete with another team's XSV board over an ethernet link