Braeden Jury

BEAR UBC, or Bionics Engineering Analyis and Research UBC, is a design team founded in the pursuit of low-cost bionics, developed by undergraduate engineering students. I founded this team alongside 5 others, and currently lead the Electrical/Software subteam for our first project, GRASP.

My role has been both as a developer and a manager - I am developing the power management circuitry while also delegating and monitoring the development of motor control circuitry, a neural network for signal processing, and the onboard control systems. Additionally, I manage the budget, administration concerns, and sponsorship for the subteam, while communicating frequently with the mechanical subteam, offering my design experience and an electrical perspective.

Order 66 is a robot built for the purpose of retrieving Ewoks from the clutches of the Empire, while navigating through the treacherous stronghold.

In order to make it to all the Ewoks, Order 66 was built with two halves, Vader Bot and Trooper Bot, which worked together to cross multiple large gaps, grab the Ewoks, and safely return them home.

I personally designed the mechanics of Vader Bot, which retreived the Ewoks and navigated the treacherous interior of the stronghold, along with returning them home via a zip line.

Additionally, I designed the software architecture for both robots, enabling them to communicate easily and collaborate to succeed.

A common method to recognizing emotions associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)/Operational Stress Injury(OSI) is self monitoring. This method involves recognizing moments where your mood and emotions are much stronger or change more drastically. This usually involves tracking on paper and writing it all down.

In the workplace, it can feel like there is a stigma with writing emotions down or even facing those emotions. PoppyWatch is associated with Fitbit, allowing the person to press down a button for when they have an episode, and later can go onto the website and record down their emotions and situation and more, while the Fitbit tracks the heart rate, time and location. PoppyWatch makes self-monitoring easier and more comfortable in a stressful environment that Veterans and First Responders have to deal with.

I personally developed the software on the FitBit, wrangling the API into posting the results to our own database in Google FireBase.

To see more about PoppyWatch, check out the GitHub!

Safe Talk is an app that allows a selected group of people to know the users' location in scenarios of fear and danger.

The simple-to-use app allows the user to set a trusted group of people in their contacts, and a easily accessible "HELP" button on the main screen. In the case of the user feeling unsafe or in danger, they can press the "HELP" button and it instantly sends an SMS message to their trusted network with their last known location.

Additionally, if a trusted friend has gone missing, you can request their last known location, and SafeTalk will inform them you are searching for them.

My main contribution to this project was the location data and database setup, along with integrating reverse geocoding, that is, obtaining a street address from a latitude and longitude, into the project.

To see more about SafeTalk, check out the GitHub!