Specialization:

My specialization is embedded hardware and software. I originally started college pursuing Electrical Engineering, however, when we were taught introductory programming in my first freshmen engineering course, I discovered I had a knack for it and decided to switch to Computer Engineering. Between my Computer Engineering undergraduate and Electrical and Computer Engineering masters, I have had a lot of opportunity to expand my knowledge in embedded design.

What led you to join aMDI?

I have been really close friends with Jon Vinsko since our freshmen year in engineering and have been roommates with him for two and a half years. He started working at aMDI in January 2017 and would talk to me about all the experience he was getting as a student worker here, so I aspired to get similar experience under my belt while I worked through my masters.

Some of your most significant work at aMDI:

I have done various tasks around the office, typically pertaining to circuit design or embedded programming. The majority of my time at aMDI, however, has been spent on our Sterilogy project to develop a three component system for monitoring sterilization compliance for health care professionals.

The first of the three components is the Personal Sanitizer Unit (PSU), that a health care worker uses to sterilize his/ her hands upon entering or leaving a patient’s zone, recording each time the user enters or leaves a zone with whether or not he/ she was compliant and sterilized. The second component is the Zone Alarm Emitter Unit (ZAEU), that attaches to a patient’s bed and uses a large inductor coil to produce a magnetic field, detectable by the PSU, to indicate when the user is in range of a patient and needs to sterilize.

The final component is the Base Station Unit (BSU) which connects to a computer in the hospital and communicates with the many PSUs to collect compliance and non-compliance records. It uploads the events to a database for ease of viewing various levels of compliance in the hospital, such as overall compliance, department compliance, or down to an individual health care worker's compliance.

Five year plan:

I am on track to wrap up my masters after the winter semester, at which point I plan on staying around Grand Rapids to begin my career in engineering. My goal is to work at a company similar to aMDI, developing embedded systems for medical devices or user electronics.

If you could change or add one thing at aMDI, what would it be?

I think we are desperately in need of a ping-pong table here at aMDI.

Skills you’re hoping to improve on in your remaining tenure here:

My goal is to be a very well rounded designer with embedded systems, so I hope to continue developing my skills in programming and hardware design while I am here. I am very proficient in programming using the C-language, so I intend on spending some time with other languages, such as Rust or Python.

Outside of school and work, how do you prefer to spend your time?

I spend a lot of my free time with friends and family. I would say a lot of my free time is spent gaming, watching movies or TV shows, playing hockey and bowling.

Three words your colleagues at aMDI would use to describe you:

This is a tough one. Nobody would help me. I would think I could be described as sarcastic, organized and dedicated.

If you had the option to travel to any place in the world, where would you go?

I really only have one bucket list place I want to visit and that is Germany. I actually just recently started learning German because I hope to make a trip to Deutschland with my family sometime next year after I graduate.

Find Trevor Ekin on LinkedIn