Welcome! Our names are Amanda Ashmen, Ryan Bosanko, and Herschel Norwitz and this is our senior project. We built an athletic recovery device, advised by Professor Takashi Buma, Phd. Below is a brief description of the problem we solved.

Risk of injury, associated with competing in a sport at a high level, is a setback that all athletes fear and many come to face.  At Union College, these injuries are mostly treated by the training room, where unsustainable single-use plastic ice bags are used before appointments with the trainer. While there are reusable gel ice packs on the market, the surface temperature for these products can become too cold or not cold enough for ideal cold therapy treatment. These chemically based ice packs must also be refrozen between uses. Other products that are able to hold a temperature for an extended period of time, such as liquid-based cold therapy machines, do not provide temperature regulation that could be useful for personalization to the athlete or body part. While some products do have the ability to control temperature and apply compression, this comes at a steep cost and makes operation and sanitization cumbersome.

For this project, we worked with Union College’s athletic training room to design a device that will address the drawbacks of the current cold therapy methods being utilized. An electronically powered ice pack with the ability to control the temperature and duration of the treatment for consecutive uses was designed, a valuable and sustainable asset to the Union College training room.