ACARA

Everyday 850 water main breaks occur in the U.S., which cost over $3 billion annually to repair with an additional $2.6 billion in damages. Baltimore City alone endures nearly 1,000 water main breaks per year. Breaks occur frequently mainly due to cities’ aging pipe infrastructure. For example, in NYC, pipes date all the way back to the 1870s. As cities cannot replace all of the aging pipes at once, we propose a system that will help them prioritize the pipe replacement, in order to reduce the number of water main breaks. Our robot will travel through city pipes and is capable of detecting cracks and blockages. Through the use of seismographic sensors and image processing, ACARA prioritizes which crack locations are most probable to rupture - allowing cities to save money by identifying problems before they emerge. ACARA is unlike any other technology on the market. Currently cities spend approximately $3 million per incident addressing the damages caused by water main breaks. Conservatively, if our system helps reduce this cost by 20%, it is a savings of $600,000 per water main break. This means a city like Baltimore, which suffers about one thousand water main breaks per year, can save $600 million annually. ACARA also decreases the inconvenience to residents who may be rerouted or lose water for an extended period of time. Furthermore, ACARA reduces the amount of potable water lost each year to water main breaks. ACARA will be sold as a service to cities. We will be responsible for collecting and analyzing the data to provide the cities with a list of prioritized rupture points. We are currently building a prototype and working with Baltimore City’s Department of Public Works in order to test ACARA.

Alex Hernandez, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate
Catherine Howard, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate
Amit Mehta, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate
Rahul Modi, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate
Alexa Oxer, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate

 

IdeaConnect

Johns Hopkins University, like many other universities in the nation, displays a conspicuous lack of interdisciplinary collaboration between fields which critically maims its objective of harnessing student potential. This lack of fluidity in conversation stems from a poorly managed networking system that hinders students from transforming their idea, with the help of appropriate contacts in fields different from theirs, into reality. IdeaConnect is a student-based online forum that will “match” users based on their listed scholarly interests, passions and ideas, aspects of a person that are very often not reflected by their professional resumes. Anyone with a “.edu” address will have the ability to make an account on IdeaConnect. This online forum will pilot in the different Johns Hopkins Institutions, with a potential for growing to nearby academic institutions and so forth.

Michael Batista, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate
Manasvini Singh, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Graduate
Sneha Shah, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Doctor of Medicine Candidate
Jon Robinson

MyPsych

MyPsych develops technology to improve mental health and cultivate positive emotional wellbeing. MyPsych includes an App, a website platform for Therapists to streamline patient communication, and iMyPsych for schools and students to pursue wellbeing in the community. With the app, users improve emotional awareness, create goals, and track progress. The app to TES website system allows therapists to streamline patient-therapist communication, enabling treatment to be more effective, efficient, and accessible. iMyPsych for students and schools help to improve mental health and cultivate positive emotional wellbeing in the school community. MyPsych is also developing predictive analytics to predict panic attacks an hour before they occur and recognize anxiety in real-time using live physiological data and adaptive algorithms.

Chong Leng Chan, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate
David Conway

 

ProToGo

Proper nutrition is essential for anyone trying to achieve fitness goals. Our surveys indicate that the average student on the Johns Hopkins campus identified protein as a sustained energy source and viable workout supplement. Respondents also had general complaints about the lack of access to such products; the average active individual needed an easy, preferably healthy energy boost that did not require a sit-down meal. Many active individuals, including varsity athletes, indicated that there was a need for products on campus that provided healthy, free energy. As a result, we designed ProToGo, a self-serve vending machine that provides freshly mixed protein shakes to customers. ProToGo differentiates from typical vending machines in that ProToGo mixes the beverages fresh immediately after the customer places an order. In that way, we are able to purchase a variety of protein mixes and their solvents (water/milk) separately in bulk, which is considerably more cost effective than pre-bottled goods. Moreover, a self-serve machine offers many key advantages over a stand or kiosk. The latter option requires an employee to constantly operate the “storefront.” The ProToGo includes a fully automated self-cleaning blender that would not require hands-on cleaning. With these advantages in our design, we believe that ProToGo offers the new standard in providing convenient, healthy, nutrition.

Michael Leddy, Whiting School of Engineering, Undergraduate
James Lin, Whiting School of Engineering, Undergraduate

ReadCracker

The newspaper and magazine industry has experienced a steady decline in revenue as online content has become more and more prevalent. The news industry has been turned upside down by the proliferation of online content. ReadCracker marries the needs of the industry with the desires of the customer. ReadCracker portal is a payment aggregator platform where the users maintain accounts to purchase R-credits which can be spent on newspaper sites to read articles. ReadCracker partners with newspaper sites. Customers will not have to subscribe to each website they visit, which means no writing down dozens of usernames, passwords, and credit card security questions..

Kandarp Patel, Carey Business School, Graduate
Kashyap Purani, Carey Business School, Graduate
Sam Hopkins

 

SequeBase

SequeBase provides a faster, more powerful, more intuitive and more accessible alternative to most bioinformatics software tools used in the industry today. SequeBase is intended to be a software suite for bioinformatics that enables scientists to both develop a big picture of genomics and save time by eliminating mundane activities in order to focus on groundbreaking work. 

Tom Catullo, Whiting School of Engineering, Undergraduate
Alex Crits-Christoph, Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, Undergraduate

 

The Meltdown

The Meltdown is a portable snow-melting mat embedded with heated cables that will be able to melt the snow as it falls and drain the water off driveways and . The Meltdown will be simple to use; it can be rolled out before a snowstorm and easily rolled back to be stored away when it is done being uses. It is durable enough for cars to drive over and people to walk on. This is more convenient and safer than shoveling because the mat will consistently be melting the snow so the owner will not have to worry about shoveling multiple times a day to keep a safe open path for people and cars. The meltdown will be marketed to homeowners, business owners and institutions like universities and hospitals and sold at home improvement realtors and online.

Lindsay Adam, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate
Carolyn Filler, Whiting School of Engineering, Graduate

 

Urban Maintenance Dispatch Platform

Cities rely on regular maintenance to operate. Workers are dispatched daily to address work requests submitted by diligent citizens. Mismanaging municipal labor leads to significant loss of time and money. We plan to build a new dispatch platform that will distribute maintenance crews more efficiently. This business is applicable to a number of cities and markets throughout the country. With a software as a service delivery model, we can easily scale to handle multiple customers. Our goal is to create a viable long-term product that can benefit the community

Matthew DelGrosso, Whiting School of Engineering,, Undergraduate
Samuel Kelly