MEMS 411: Waterproof Enclosure for Smart Shirt Microcontroller

The purpose of this project was to create an enclosure for a microcontroller for an electronic shirt, made by Dr. Mary Ruppert-Stroescu. The electronic shirt was made to help people with sleep apnea track their EKG, blood pressure, and heart rate in an easy and non-invasive way.The current design being used has sharp edges and is not very secure. The goal of our new design was to make the enclosure comfortable to the wearer while also maintaining a water tight seal. This was done through multiple iterations of rounded enclosures with different gaskets. The end design was a two piece enclosure that was connected via hinges and sealed with a gasket to ensure water tightness.To test the effectiveness of our design, three performance tests were conducted. The first test was a water test that entailed submerging the compartment in water for 30 seconds to test for water tightness. The second test was a drop test which entailed dropping the compartment on various surfaces to see if it will fracture. The final test was a compression test which entailed placing a heavy weight on the enclosure to see if it will break. Our final prototype passed all these tests, ensuring that we have met our design criteria.