Carnegie Mellon Biomedical Engineering Students Win Award for Designing
  Device to Help People with Autism
From: Carnegie Mellon University - 09/28/2007

A team of biomedical engineering students from Carnegie Mellon University
recently won first place in a national Student Design Competition for its
redesign of a "Hug Machine" to calm people with autism. The competition was
sponsored by the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for the
Advancement of Cognitive Technologies (RERC-ACT) and the Colorado-based
Coleman Institute.

Hug Machine Team leader Jenna L. Colbaugh, who now works in package design
and development for the Procter & Gamble Company, said the Hug Machine is
designed to help people with autism cope with anxiety and other
stress-related conditions by safely applying soothing lateral body pressure
which the user controls. The team's goal was to redesign a very costly
commercially available device into an affordable system that could be easily
built by parents, schools and clinics with autistic children or adults.

Read the entire article at:
https://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/September/sept28_hugmachine.shtml

Links:
Award-Winning Device Helps Autistic
http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/collaboration/2007/fall/hug-machine.shtml

Carnegie Mellon Biomedical Engineering
http://www.bme.cmu.edu

James Antaki
http://www.bme.cmu.edu/people/faculty1.html

Submitted by Forest Jiang