PCEC News
Engineering Alum Creates Tracking Device for COVID-19
May 08, 2020
Nick Hayhoe completed a dual degree in Mechanical Engineering and Product Design and Manufacturing Engineering at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in 2007 and went on to obtain a master’s degree in Product Design and Development from Northwestern University. Now, as the VP of Sales for Fleetwood Electronics, Nick works with customers to solve problems and launch products.
Fleetwood Electronics is a division of Fleetwood Group, which formed in 1955 with a focus on building school furniture. The company almost immediately began integrating electronics into school furniture. When COVID-19 hit the United States, Fleetwood shut down its furniture operations to protect employees, but its electronics operations, which were producing parts for a medical device, were deemed an essential service and continued operating.
In early April 2020, company leadership began exploring options for bringing employees back to work after the Michigan Shelter-in-Place order was lifted. As a 100% employee-owned, Christ-centered company, Fleetwood is deeply committed to the health and well-being of its employees. This commitment drives decision making throughout the organization, and leadership wanted to make sure that when employees did return to work, they’d be able to do so safely. There were more questions than answers as the team grappled with how to encourage social distancing habits and track and respond to COVID-19 exposure. Fleetwood Electronics has decades of experience creating battery-powered wireless devices and a team of experts in mechanical, firmware, and hardware engineering. Why couldn’t the company use its high-performance device manufacturing capabilities to create a product that would track exposure to COVID-19? And so, the idea for the Instant-Trace was born.
Instant-Trace is a small, clip-on badge containing wireless-sensing technology that allows businesses to quickly determine which team members have been in close proximity in the previous 14 days to a colleague diagnosed with COVID-19 while also promoting social distancing among employees. This information allows businesses to act quickly in the case of exposure to protect employees by sending people home for self-quarantine and implementing heavier cleaning in impacted parts of a building. Instant-Trace is not a location device but instead tracks its proximity to other badges. When employees sign out of the company at the end of their shift, the data gets backed up in the cloud, allowing the company to run contact tracing reports if needed.
Fleetwood Electronics partnered with Phase 1 Engineering to create a protocol which allows for high accuracy distance measurement using very low power. Being both the developer and manufacturer, Fleetwood was able to prototype and iterate quickly to get the Instant-Trace launched on a very short timeline. Currently, the Instant-Trace is in the transition from prototype to production and Fleetwood plans to implement the Instant-Trace on-site as they welcome employees back into the workplace. Fleetwood Electronics is accepting pre-orders for devices which will begin shipping in mid-May. The Instant-Trace will be field-updatable once implemented and is designed to be customizable and to accommodate other uses in the future.
Nick noted that many of the Fleetwood employees and external partners that collaborated on the Instant-Trace were graduates of the GVSU School of Engineering. Additional key members of the Fleetwood Instant-Trace team included Jason Grant (CEO, Instant-Trace sales), Travis Wilson (hardware design and operations), Brian Harvey (firmware engineering, GVSU MSE ’09), Noe Villanueva (electrical engineering, GVSU BSE ’19), and Nicholas Bernhardt (computer engineering co-op student, GVSU BSE expected ’21). Other partners were John Videtich (Phase 1 Engineering, electrical engineering, GVSU BSE ’07) and Steven Bakker (web and marketing).
In regards to his undergraduate education at GVSU, Nick said he chose the School of Engineering because it “has by far the most hands-on opportunities of any college in the region.” He would encourage any students thinking about pursuing a career in engineering to find opportunities to engage in hands-on work to learn by doing and to differentiate themselves from peers when first looking for a job in the field. As a student, Nick participated in the SAE Baja team building off-road vehicles. He also deeply appreciated the mentoring he received from Bob Bero in the Keller Engineering Labs.
Nick felt that his education at GVSU prepared him well to understand both the design process and manufacturing. “You have to be able to not only innovate, but actually launch products into the market,” Nick said. “The experiential education obtained through co-op, projects, and extra curriculars was so valuable.”
The Instant-Trace has been featured by FOX17, WOODTV, MiBiz, and the Holland Sentinel.
Learn more about the GVSU Padnos College of Engineering & Computing.