Sometimes the law isn’t enough protection.
A few years ago Conrad Airall, a lawyer in Raleigh, had a client who plead guilty to assaulting a female. The judge accepted his plea and directed him to return to court the following Monday to receive sentencing.
“Then the next day the [District Attorney] told me that my client wasn’t going to show up to court because he was wanted for attempted murder,” Airall said.
Even with a restraining order and explicit instructions from the judge to not go near the victim, the perpetrator found her and violently attacked — beating her within inches of her life. An ambulance rushed her to the hospital while her abuser fled the state.
Events like this one are not uncommon in domestic violence cases, and the tragic nature gave Airall an idea.
“The idea was to give a victim an early warning when a perpetrator is close by,” he said. “If he was wearing a bracelet and came within a distance of her she would know.”
Airall’s idea led him to sponsor a senior design project for the electrical engineering department.
ECE design projects take practical problems and mold solutions, such as Airall’s idea for domestic violence victim alert systems and speech therapy for children who stutter but cannot afford the expensive technology available. Yesterday at the McKimmon Center, ECE seniors displayed their semester-long projects to professors, friends and technical companies.
The design process is important for engineering students because it submerges them in a world of real-life problems such as budgets, materials and time, said Barton Greene, director of the Design Center.
Adam Boyle, Gage Dupree, Amit Bharwani, Demetrius Harrison and Brian Sizemore make up the team of students who had to solve Airall’s problem. They created a little black box that will beep or light up when it detects a leg identification bracelet, or something similar, that the criminal wears so the victim has notification.
“She can carry the box and if her attacker is within a mile she will know, or if she is inside within 600 feet,” Dupree said.
Some counties, such as Franklin, use GPS to track dangerous criminals — but that does not help the victims in danger, according to Dupree. In the future, the students want to increase the technology so as the perpetrator gets closer to the victim the sound gets louder or beeps faster.
“It is expandable because we haven’t used the technology to its greatest extent yet,” Dupree said.
The design day projects have the potential to help individuals with serious issues that effect their quality of life. It can help victims of assault by keeping them aware, and it can help people with speech problems learn to speak correctly.
The Smooth Talker 3000 is a project developed by Chris McHenry, Charles Vaughn and Joe Teleoglou, sponsored by Allen and Paula Little for their son David who suffers from a severe stutter.
A proven method for treating stutters is using a voice-delay system that feeds the person’s voice back so he or she can hear it. It’s a method that is 75 percent effective when used by itself and 100 percent effective when used with a speech pathologist, according to Teleoglou. But it’s technology that remains very expensive.
“There are some on the market, but they cost $2,000 to $2,500,” Teleoglou said. “Our goal was to make it under $200. Currently we’re at $120. And it is for a family in South Carolina who couldn’t afford one of the fancy models.”
The current model cost 1,000 percent less then the market cost and is working, but has not been tested on David yet.
“You can hear the delay through the microphone. It’s buffered and returned to the ear,” Vaughn said.
The potential these projects have to improve lives is not only bound to the implications of the original ideas, but the technology can be expanded in the future to help even more people. Airall pointed out another application for the notification system he is sponsoring.
“It also has implications for sex offenders who come too close to a school,” he said.
