Making Smart Wearable Devices Smarter

Making wearable smart devices smarter, is one of the heavily invested research in the tech industry today.

Our guest Henry Crandall, a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Utah talks about his electrical research applied to human health monitoring and diagnosis. He will also briefly talk about his involvement in the IEEE, BioHive Utah, and his exciting role as a student board member in the IPC.

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Show Highlights:

• Introduction to Henry Crandall, his research, and involvement with IPC
• Henry’s research focuses on the intersection of electrostatic and biology. How electrical applications can help diagnose disease and monitor health care condition
• How Henry’s research relates to Elon Musk’s “Neuralink”
• What is Neural Engineering?
• Bioimpedance and non-invasive sensor products are already available through wearable health devices just like the smartwatches
• Henry explains briefly the difference between surface measurement and penetration depth
• Photoplethysmography is what you called the green lights on the back of your smartwatches, it uses light to monitor the cardiovascular system
• Henry’s current research in a nutshell: a Bioimpedance sensor to monitor blood pressure
• One of Henry’s goals in his research is to collect as much data and come up with an algorithm that will help smart devices to become even smarter
• Major tech companies are investing heavily in research that could help make wearable smart devices gather actual clinically relevant data
• Henry talks about his involvement in the IPC as a student member of the IPC Board of Directors
• Both Zach and Henry share their experience with the IEEE
• As a student member of the IPC board of directors, Henry gets involved in decision-making regarding governance, the strategy, and the financial sides of the organization
• IPC has definitely prioritized and put a lot of effort to attract the youth to engineering
• Henry with a health tech focus start-up called BioHive Utah

Links and Resources

• Connect with Henry Crandall on LinkedIn
• Meet Henry Crandall: New IPC Student Board Member
• Learn More About BioHive
• Read: Henry co-authored IoMT-enabled stress monitoring in a virtual reality environment and at home

Henry Crandall:

And then my specific research fits into the side of trying to use this as a non-invasive sensor to actually continuously and non-invasively monitor healthcare conditions. If that's not specific enough, I'm going into an even further niche of it which is looking into how we can use electricity to monitor the cardiovascular system to estimate parameters like blood pressure, heart rate, interbeat interval, stress, some of those really interesting parameters.

Zach Peterson:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Altium On Track podcast. I'm your host, Zach Peterson. Today I'm very happy to be talking with Henry Crandall. He is a National Science Foundation graduate research fellow and PhD candidate at University of Utah. We're going to be talking with him today a bit about his research and his involvement with IPC. Henry, thanks so much for joining us.

Henry Crandall:

Hey, Zach, happy to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, absolutely. I first stumbled upon you not because you're an NSF grad research fellow or through your research necessarily, but I actually came to know of you and you came across my radar because I'd heard that you are actually the student member on the IPC board of directors.

Henry Crandall:

Absolutely. I mean, the National Science Foundation Research Fellowship, that's really quite new, so I wouldn't have expected you to know about that one. My research, I think it's important, but might not also have reached your radar either. But yeah, I'm the student member of the IPC board of directors for the year 2023.

Zach Peterson:

So, I think before we get into that, tell us a little bit about your research because I find it very interesting once I did a little digging, but also it relates back to some things that some other folks who I was in university with have done in the past. Now, this was 20 years ago, but in any case, I still find it really interesting. So, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you do.

Henry Crandall:

Absolutely. So, I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Utah in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. And so, my research is kind of at the intersection of biology and electrostatics or electromagnetism, and all my research field, it focuses on applying electricity to biological tissue, and by so doing we can find interesting, I guess, details and we can measure qualities that help us to diagnose disease and to monitor health signs. And so, a lot of the applications of this field of bioimpedance as it's called, focuses on, for example, diagnosing skin cancer, diagnosing breast cancer, and then also coming up with other clinically relevant kind of health indicators. So, a lot of the headway that we've seen is using this technology for body composition analysis in the commercial sector. So, trying to tell you what percentage of your body is muscle, what percentage of your body is fat, that's received wide-scale application in smartwatches as well as smart scales.

And then my specific research fits into the side of trying to use this as a non-invasive sensor to actually continuously and non-invasively monitor healthcare conditions. If that's not specific enough, I'm going into an even further niche of it which is looking into how we can use electricity to monitor the cardiovascular system to estimate parameters like blood pressure, heart rate, interbeat interval, stress, some of those really interesting parameters.

Zach Peterson:

I think when someone hears measuring electrical properties of the body or stimulating certain parts of the body using electricity, they probably get the image of Neuralink.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, yeah.

Zach Peterson:

Like Elon Musk is involved somewhere.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. So, something, they do that same thing of trying to combine human and electronics, right? It's funny, I think when we first hear these kind of things, it sounds like those are two things that shouldn't go together at all, right? You think our body and electricity shouldn't mix, but in reality, our body actually organically produces electricity. It's the backbone of our nervous system. So, all of the nerve signaling that happens, that's actually just voltage and apparent current traveling through our nerve membranes, and then the same time our heart, the basis for its actual contraction is also the propagation of voltage potentials. So, there's an absolute connection there.

What Elon Musk is doing with Neuralink and other kind of computer brain interfaces, that's trying to hack into and connect with the nervous system side of things. So, we've discovered that we can actually monitor our nervous system by using implantable electrodes and hooking up to nerves, and we can record activity by that. And then something like Neuralink, they're trying to go a step farther and exogenously control, I guess, biology through impulses and whatnot. So, my university is actually a really big player in that we've got a lot of interesting research that does similar things for trying to help amputees and paraplegics regain function with prosthetics or kind of bypassing diseased or inactive neural pathways.

Zach Peterson:

That was actually something that I was going to ask you about was, I guess, that's more on the treatment side, but looking at implants for prosthetics or treatment of things that might require very targeted simulation as opposed to surgery. So, what can you do with simulation or bioimpedance to aid, I guess, increases in quality of life for those types of patients?

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. So, just as I mentioned, I think the biggest area of improvement, and it's a pretty hot topic, is this neural engineering field where we're discovering that we can give control back to, I guess, people that have lost limbs and are now using prosthetics. We can allow them to control these prosthetics with their mind, which is insane, and they can actually interpret the neurological signals that are getting sent through the tissue that's still there, try to read it, and then convert it into something that your prosthetic will understand. That's outside of my field. I'm not involved with that at all, but I do have some colleagues that are extremely involved in that, and it's very fascinating and obviously a very promising thing, especially if they can deliver the quality of life to some of these people that have lost limbs or lost function like that.

Zach Peterson:

I know you just said you're not totally involved, but I'm going to ask you one question to see if this might be how someone might interact with a prosthetic. So, let's suppose somebody lost their hand for whatever reason, and they have a prosthetic hand. Are they essentially thinking, using their brain, to maybe stimulate or send some impulse to a nerve and then you have a product or a board in the hand that then senses that signal and then the product knows, oh, okay, I'm supposed to close the hand or rotate the hand, something like that?

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, that's the exact idea. There's a research lab in the university that's really going deep into this stuff, and the way they kind of explained this and present it is through Star Wars. When I think it's Luke or whoever gets his hand cut off and then he comes back with the robotic hand, that's basically what they're saying they're doing, that we've come up with a prosthetic that you think and then it moves which is a huge new frontier for prosthetics. The actual method for working is at a high level what you described, yeah.

Zach Peterson:

God, that's so interesting, and I guess for anybody that is fearful of losing a limb, at least there are some solutions out there. I wondered how accessible they are because if this is something that's going on in a university, it's probably not widely out there, available commercially, is it? I mean, do-

Henry Crandall:

Not at all, not at all, it should be mentioned.

Zach Peterson:

I guess I was going to say, it seems like it would be a patient by patient basis.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, absolutely. I was going to say it should be mentioned that this is very experimental and preliminary right now. So, I think we have a research lab here that's also kind of spun some of their stuff off into a startup and they maybe have one or two patients that they've tried to clinically implement this in. So, yeah, it's not something that you could go and get the actual treatment today or get hooked up to this thing. I mean, it's still an invasive procedure where you're going to have to have some kind of electrodes actually implanted into your limb. So, it's very cool on paper, a lot of work to be done before everybody's getting in line for that.

Zach Peterson:

Are there foundations that are involved in this too? Because I could imagine the costs at this point since this is not super commercialized might be a bit prohibitive for some people to access?

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, I mean, I can't speak to the cost of it at all, but I know that it's a very hot topic from at least the research side. That's why you see a lot of money getting thrown behind projects like Neuralink or the startup here in Utah's Blackrock Microsystems. They've also had some big fundraising rounds. I think a lot of people are very intrigued by it. From the, I guess, patient perspective, I have no idea what the price tag of that looks like. I think right now if you're an amputee and you're willing to engage with these research teams and maybe qualify for this kind of experimental protocol, maybe they'd be interested in you.

Zach Peterson:

Sure. I guess for them it gives them a good test subject to hopefully develop an actual product and then eventually get it through FDA and out there to the market.

Henry Crandall:

Exactly. Exactly.

Zach Peterson:

So, with these measurements that have to be done on the human body, how do you take that measurement, and then you mentioned the electrodes or the probes that go into the human body, how do you take those and get those onto an actual product or eventually onto a chip or a PCB? What does that type of system look like?

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. So, that's going to be a very interesting avenue of this research as well. So, kind of stepping away from the neural engineering part and more towards the bioimpedance as a non-invasive sensor as just a way to measure information instead of trying to control something with your mind. There's a couple different form factors that I've seen out there. One of them is into some kind of wearable health monitor, such as a smart ring or a smartwatch. In that kind of environment, you can naturally integrate electrodes into the back of the watch crown. Just like with the current products, they've got optical sensors already just right in the bottom of it. Some of the smart rings, same thing. They've got optical sensors built along the inside of that ring. To do this with impedance sensors, you just replace that optical sensor with some kind of metal or some kind of metallic compound there that functions as the electrode.

So, that's the one avenue for a wearable device, and then the other avenue that's also a hot topic is e-textiles, so actually trying to integrate the electrodes into fabric you already wear. So, that can be like, oh, my compression athletic shirt has ECG patches just woven right into it and so while I'm working out, it's going to be able to collect this data, or maybe it's in the socks of an elderly person so they can have a snug contact there with some of the blood vessels in their feet and they're going to be pulling that data as well. So, e-textiles is whereas smart ring, smartwatches, I feel like those are the main at least application for this in the consumer wearable side.

Zach Peterson:

With those methods that you mentioned though, I mean, aren't those just surface measurements? Let's say you needed a deeper measurement of a nerve, let's say going back to the arm example, would that electrode or that probe have to be brought to the surface first before it could interact with a smartwatch?

Henry Crandall:

So, for doing actual surface measurements and penetration depth where you're talking about, probably two different avenues there. If you're trying to monitor neurologic activity, you can do that from a surface measurement which would be non-invasive through just some of those sticky wet gel electrodes that you see for ECG patients in the hospital. That's one way to monitor that activity which is the benefit of non-invasive but generally has less quality. And then to actually hook up with a nerve, you need to probably stick it with a needle which is obviously invasive and uncomfortable. So, for the purpose of a wearable device, you can use these surface electrodes and you can actually tune how deep those electric fields can penetrate and what they can sense by the arrangement of the electrodes. So, you can play around with how close they are versus how far apart, and that'll change how deep the current and voltage field lines go.

Zach Peterson:

I see. Okay. That's very interesting.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah.

Zach Peterson:

That's cool that you can engineer kind of the depth that you need to measure without actually having to get in there with a piece of metal, let's say, and take a literal measurement.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, exactly. So, for my research, I think it's a huge, huge vote for bioimpedance over some other sensors that might be like a photoplethysmography which uses the green light to measure things because for my, I'm interested-

Zach Peterson:

I was wondering if that's what that was.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. So, that that's called photoplethysmography, those little green lights you see on the back of your watch. That's using light to try to monitor hemodynamic things, so things happening with your cardiovascular system. And so, that's the really nice thing about the electricity and the impedance sensors is that you can tell it how far to go which for me, I want to find arteries, I want to measure your arteries and keep track of what's going on in your arteries. And so, for that sense, we can design a specific array that'll be able to penetrate deep enough to get your arteries and also be sensitive to what's happening there.

Zach Peterson:

I see. I see. So, what happens on the actual board? Are there specialized ASICs for taking these measurements? Is it all custom silicone? Can you do it in FPGA? Is this just analog signals coming out? You throw it through an analog interface and then put it into a microcontroller? What does that process look like when you're actually designing at the system level?

Henry Crandall:

So, there's a couple different options right now, fortunately it's a mature enough technology where you could go buy an off-the-shelf analog front end chip. So, some of the leading manufacturers, they are already developing really small microchips that can perform these measurements, multiple frequencies on multiple channels. And so, that's a premade ready-to-go solution that you can incorporate into your PCB as is. I've also seen some other people that opt to develop their own sensing mechanisms from the ground up, and that usually involves some kind of stimulus block where that can apply alternating current into human tissue and then some kind of operational amplifier that can sense the voltage that that current develops, and then you can hook it up to your regular demodulation loop to extract the meaningful information.

Zach Peterson:

So, I would imagine that if someone's pulling an off-the-shelf chip, it's probably for something that has, of course, very large market... excuse me, market applicability. So, for example, in plethysmography, something that is built into a million units of a product per year, so like a smartwatch, but probably if someone wants to do something with custom measurement or a really unique algorithm, they're going to have to go the route of building an analog interface and then putting all that logic or that code onto a microcontroller or an FPGA.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, I think you've actually described, it depends on your needs.

Zach Peterson:

Sure.

Henry Crandall:

If you want to build your own thing and have complete control over it, a lot of people do that. Some in the research field, part of it is just to say you've got something novel, like we built our own hardware which a lot of electrical engineers are really fascinated with. Some people are more interested on the algorithmic side. So, I'll use tools that we already have and then I'll take measurements and turn that into something really cool.

Zach Peterson:

So, what are some of your core results? I know you mentioned a couple of threads there in the academic research side, right? One is the hardware architecture, and then the other is probably the processing and the algorithms.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. So, for my own research, I'm trying to use a bioimpedance sensor to monitor blood pressure without having to use the typical inflatable cuff. And so, the avenues where we're really excited, we're doing a lot of modeling. So, we're trying to come up with some biophysical explanation of how our blood flow actually modulates the conductivity, the electrical conductivity of our blood, and then in turn how we're measuring that with impedance. So, that's a pretty big feat that we're excited about where we're trying to come up with the mathematical equations to describe all that. So, I guess the three pillars of research in general are you can do that, you can analytically describe something with modeling, you can do some finite element or simulations to maybe try to investigate some things that you cannot perfectly analytically solve or perfectly experiment, and the third thing is to do experimentation. We were involved with all of that with the modeling.

I'm also doing some simulation on some really fancy software that actually takes MRI images of humans where they go layer by layer and reconstruct every single tissue that you have in your body and give it its own properties. So, we have these models of actual humans that we can simulate all the electrical stimulation we want to. And so, we do some interesting exploration with that to try to interpret how applying this kind of stimulus will look, what kind of response does it have when we tweak little bits of that experiment. And then the last thing is we're trying to collect some experimental data in a population of participants to try to see how this actually looks in a diverse population.

Zach Peterson:

So, when you say collect experimental measurements, you're actually doing the blood pressure measurements with some kind of prototype system on real people.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. We have some prototype systems, we're gathering a whole host of physiological sensors. We're collecting all this data and then we're going to analyze it and hopefully come up with some really cool algorithms that'll help us to make our smart devices even smarter and be able to tell us more about our health.

Zach Peterson:

It's so interesting. Do you ever find in the process of doing one of these trials that somebody might have some kind of medical condition or some other thing about them that interferes with the ability of the device to do what it needs to do?

Henry Crandall:

It's a great question. We haven't done any large scale human subject trials yet, but we're preparing for those. We've done some smaller preliminary ones, and usually the screening process is quite rigorous, so they're trying to eliminate if you might have any kind of health conditions that we suspect might be detrimental to our work. Certainly we have safeguards in place to make sure that whatever we're doing wouldn't be harmful to the participants naturally. Yeah.

Zach Peterson:

Makes a lot of sense. When you said the blood pressure measurements, and I'm not a medical professional by any means, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I would've thought that this would've been like a pressure measurement just looking at the pulse on the bottom of somebody's wrist. So, if you want to build it into a smartwatch, you could do that, but I don't know if you could even get blood pressure from that. You can get pulse, obviously.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds pretty simple, right, the way you've described it. Measuring heart rate is one thing, but actually measuring the pressure, the force that your blood's exerting on that artery is another beast altogether. The way that that's clinically done is you go to the doctor's office, you sit down and they strap an inflatable cuff on your arm, and they have to apply external pressure, and then they go through this whole method to try to identify what the pressure pushing back on that artery is at a really high level, without going into too many of the boring details. The really tricky thing about this is when you try to get rid of this cuff, when you say, "We don't want to make patients have to wear this cuff." It's uncomfortable when it inflates, and that only happens so often. It's not a true continuous measurement.

When you try to get rid of that cuff, the modality and the method for how you extract the pressure is completely different. It's an unanswered question, I suppose you could say for a true wearable device, something you could put into a smartwatch. It's receiving a lot of attention in research as well as commercial. So, you'll see that, pick your favorite tech company, they're trying to throw some research funding at this, right? Because you can imagine that the next smartwatch that can tell you something really relevant like your blood pressure, how valuable that would be for patients.

Zach Peterson:

I can imagine that, yeah, especially for somebody who needs to do their own kind of continuous monitoring for some kind of health condition that they have. If it's just like you just look at a watch and it tells you, I mean, that's pretty incredible, rather than having to actually strap an inflatable cuff on your arm or do something else with some big piece of Equipment.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. So, I think we're at this really cool point in this development of wearable health monitors where first thing they're telling us how many steps we walked and what our heart rate is, which I guess it's something, but it's not truly meaningful yet. You don't go to your doctor and you say, "Well, I've been recording the number of steps I've been taking for the past six months. Does this mean anything to you?" I don't know, maybe they'll pat you on your back and say, "Great, you're getting in your 10,000 steps a day."

But I think we've seen that we've adopted these wearable health monitors, and the next step is that they're going to start to peak into some of those avenues that are actually clinically relevant. We've already seen this with the electrocardiogram that many smartwatches can wear. And so, I think that was kind of the first feature that truly was that doctors would care about, and I think we're just on the tip of the iceberg there.

Zach Peterson:

When you say some tech company's pouring money into this, I could imagine one of them being named after a type of fruit.

Henry Crandall:

Absolutely. You'd be correct of that assumption, as with the other ones.

Zach Peterson:

Sure.

Henry Crandall:

Across the board, startups from the major tech companies, two of the major med tech companies. It's a very, very promising and intriguing research avenue.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, I could imagine basically having a group of these devices and bringing all of those measurements together into, let's say, an application that the doctor has, and they're able to use this for diagnosis, more than just monitoring, but really to diagnose something.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah.

Zach Peterson:

Is that one of the directions where everyone wants to go?

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, I mean, consider that, wouldn't that be amazing if you could have clinically relevant information outside of the doctor's office? What you've described is a really cool approach where you try to fuse different sensors together. So, maybe you've got one device that's monitoring your heart rate, another one that's measuring your electrocardiogram, another one doing your blood oxygen levels. These are all the things that they actually look at when you're in the hospital, and if you could do that in a way that's reliable and accurate for daily living, I just, I mean, the health insights that they could unlock would be extraordinary. And then if you combine that with the data crunch and algorithms and the machine learning algorithms that they have, I think it's a really exciting frontier and we're going to see some huge developments in personal healthcare.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, I agree, and I think one of the most interesting things about everything you've described with it being non-invasive is really the improvement in the quality of life for a patient, especially someone who has to have this kind of ongoing monitoring and care.

Henry Crandall:

Absolutely. Very few people are comfortable in the doctor's office. You can look at it from a bunch of different angles, from comfort, from financial flexibility, insurance, or the quality of healthcare that people are receiving, and this could hopefully move the power into the consumer. So, give them more options, give them more ability to manage their healthcare which I think is incredible.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So, maybe switching gears just a little bit, because we've talked about this a lot, but I mentioned earlier when we started talking that you are involved in IPC, and you're actually the student member of the IPC board of directors. How did you first get involved in volunteering with industry organizations like IPC?

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, I was hoping we were going to be able to talk about this. I really am fascinated by my research and I can talk about that forever, but yeah, absolutely want to talk about IPC and this great technical trade association and also the kind of efforts they have for students which I think is amazing. So, I first got involved as an undergraduate when the Education Foundation, they reached out to our campus and they did an information seminar. They were talking about starting a new chapter of their Education Foundation here on campus at the University of Utah.

I was in a really kind of fortuitous situation, I suppose. With my electrical engineering background, I had rallied together with a close group of students and we said, "We want to get more involved on campus, and we think it's disappointing that we don't have more kind of student club options for electrical engineers." So, we got together and we formed a chapter of the IEEE organization. We formed a student chapter there, and really shortly after that, probably just a couple of weeks, we had the IPC Education Foundation come to our campus and ask us, "Is this something you're interested in?" We absolutely were. We already had that group of motivated students, and so we got plugged in with them and then formed a student chapter at the University of Utah which is just one of the many chapters they have across the nation and the resources they have for students is awesome.

So, I would say my involvement in IPC has been the most probably influential and consequential, extra-curricular involvement I've had. In my experience, IPC, they've got more opportunities and they're more invested in students than many other student chapters I've seen. So, they've got a lot of scholarship opportunities available for students. So, that's something I applied for and received multiple occasions. And then they have multiple programs to help you get paired with mentors in industry or explore their headline APEX EXPO conference. And then there's, I guess, most recent and largest opportunity for me is actually being a member of the IPC board of directors which is a opportunity I just, I still find myself in awe of it sometimes that they bring a undergraduate or graduate student and put them on the fully fledged board of directors. So, the work that they do is awesome, and they've given me lots of opportunities to grow in my education and my career.

Zach Peterson:

It's encouraging to hear that there's a lot of opportunities for students to get involved, and I think that because the IPC is so heavily associated with those alphanumeric standards that are put out all the time, it doesn't appear to be that kind of organization where people can really get involved. And then with IEEE, there's a lot of IEEE journals, but I think it also doesn't really seem like a place for students to get involved, unless they're going to a conference.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, that's a really accurate description. I would say they're both known for probably their printed materials, the standards that IPC puts out, the journals that IEEE hosts and the conferences that are associated with them. In my experience, kind of taking a glimpse under the hood is that there's a huge network and organization of career professionals and their careers that are actively engaged, and it's almost a community of sorts, both for IEEE and IPC, both of them are pretty tight-knit communities and they want to expand. They want to grow and find the next generation of talent, find the next generation of leaders and people that are going to be involved and helped them publish more things and host new conferences, but just join the community in general. Maybe for some of them, you have to look a little bit harder to find those opportunities to get involved, but for IPC, it kind of showed up and said, "Here, we're doing this." That was nice for us. We didn't have to go look too hard to get involved there.

Zach Peterson:

Certainly, yeah. When I first got hooked up with IEEE myself, it was because my advisor suggested publishing in one of their journals, this was almost 10 years ago, but went for it and went to a conference. Before that time, I had never contemplated that students could really get involved in these kinds of organizations and find the community aspect like you're referencing. With IPC, there's definitely a community aspect, and I think more so once you start to get into a standards group. With IEEE, they have student membership levels, but I think it was also kind of difficult to find my place until I got encouraged to jump in. There was no active outreach to try and get someone like myself or other students involved.

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, I mean, I think I had a really similar experience with IEEE where we kind of had to be the instigators there. We said, "We're electrical engineering students. We want to learn more. Besides just attending the conferences, which that can be expensive and there might be travel involved, we want to get plugged in with this network and with this community." I think everybody that's on campus as a student at the undergraduate graduate level, at some point you want to get connected to the industry, and these trade associations, these organizations like IEEE and the IPC, they're a great way to do it. Yeah, in our case, we didn't maybe immediately see those connections, but we went ahead and made some, which is some I'd encourage all students to. If there's not a chapter, a extracurricular opportunity on your campus, go make one because most of the time these communities and networks exist, and they just might not be apparent to you as a student or if you're on campus. It might feel like you're a little siloed there. And so, sometimes you do have to put in some effort to make the bridge.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, I like to make the joke, you'd be amazed what happens if you just asks nicely.

Henry Crandall:

That's a really good point, and as students, we have the great opportunity to really leverage the I'm-a-student card.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, you get a lot of benefit out of that for sure. So, with your participation in the IPC, what does it look like being on the board of directors? What exactly do you do? Is your job to make sure that the interests of young people and new engineers are accurately represented in the direction that the IPC is taking, whether it's standards or whether it's outreach or conferences or whatever their activities are?

Henry Crandall:

Yeah. So, as a member of the board of directors, we have the responsibility, I guess, a big royal we there, as the board of directors as a whole, the responsibility of the board is to make sure there is an unbroken chain of accountability for the organization. So, ultimately, they make many decisions regarding the governance, the strategy, and the financial sides of the organization. I've asked members of the board several times, why would you even include a student, right? Because when you think about this trade association, you wonder, well, what kind of experience and voice do you want to give to a student who maybe has significantly less career experience than the other members of the board. I think it's a really incredible answer they have that it shows how focused they are on their Education Foundation and how valuable they think that is.

They really, really want to make sure they're connected to the young professionals and the students, because the flip side of what I said is true, that while these individuals have incredible career experience and leadership capabilities, they're pretty disconnected typically from the current students and the current next generation of members of industry. And so, yeah, I think in my head, the way I view my role on the board is to bring that perspective of a young professional and of a student that is fascinated by the electronics industry and help to voice those opinions when it comes to decisions and policy regarding, like I mentioned, the business, the strategy.

Zach Peterson:

Sure, sure. One thing that is, I think, challenging with getting students is getting them young because in order to cultivate a steady stream of talent into the industry, I think it's really important to get kids, young people, to realize the value of what we do. I think we kind of exist in the background of so many areas that people don't really realize how important PCBs, semiconductors, all of this stuff is. It's also a bit challenging because the software industry has eaten up almost two decades worth of talent that could have just as easily gone into electrical engineering. So, I'm wondering, how do you see the organization's efforts to outreach even younger, down into high school?

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, I think you made a really accurate observation that the kind of talent, the opportunities for students to go into fields is almost as big as it's ever been, and I think with the changes in demographics that we're seeing, the labor market is going to tighten up, and there's going to be a continued really high demand for students of a STEM background. As you mentioned, as that supply goes down and the demand stays up, there's going to be lots of people vying for high-quality talent within the STEM industry, whether that be software or hardware.

IPC has definitely identified this as a priority going forward, and so they're putting in a lot of efforts to try to attract the next generation. They do a lot of outreach events where they bring in high school, elementary school, and college students and try to tell them, "This is the electronics manufacturing industry. This is what we're about. This is what we do. This is the impact that we have." The reference there is incredibly meaningful. They just launched, I think, a new tool, a new website, careersinelectronics.com that tries to put some of this information in just a ready-to-go, pre-packaged spot that's got a lot of really quality information for students or parents to go look at. So, it's absolutely a priority for them as I think most players in the STEM field are recognizing, this is going to be a challenge moving forward.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, especially with all of the issues with supply chain and now talk about reshoring or nearshoring, and a lot of organizations have identified workforce crunches on the horizon. So, I would agree with everything you just said. There's a lot of at least awareness, and I think it starts with awareness.

Henry Crandall:

It does start with awareness. If I'm a student right now, and you can look out and say, "Well..." Maybe you're the belle of the ball. You get a pick where you want to go, whether that's biotech or software. Unfortunately, electronics and electronics manufacturing, that might not even be front of radar view. Many students probably aren't even exposed to this at all. It could be just a lack of knowledge and understanding. And so, I think that's a big strategy that IPC is taking is trying to remove the question, what even is that, and tell you what it is. Maybe that's their pitch they're going for.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah. When we were talking to Travis Kelly from Isola Group, he had mentioned that when his kids think of tech, they think Facebook, Google, the big software companies, the services that they use on their phone. They don't think, oh, the phone is actually the enabler of all of that, right? So, it's the hardware and everything that goes on inside of it that is actually really the most critical piece and kind of gets overlooked. So, my hope is that if you highlight, hey, if you go into this field, you can build that phone, that's really going to be the thing that kids say is, "Oh, wow, I can actually do this, and there's an actual path for me to participate in this."

Henry Crandall:

Yeah, I think it's completely true that hardware gets slept on. I feel like software's completely dominated the last little bit, for better or for worse. Yeah, I hope that the more people understand just how cool the hardware is and what you're actually building, that they'll also understand the novelty and the excitement behind that.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, definitely. So, there's one more thing that I wanted to talk about with you because you and I had talked about this before we jumped on this episode, but you had mentioned that you're working with a nonprofit in Utah. Is that correct?

Henry Crandall:

I am. So, I try to stay very involved as a student. I'm very interested in industry, and so as you've noticed, I've been involved with IEEE and IPC. I'm also involved with a more biotech and health tech focused startup called BioHive Utah, and it's this nonprofit in our state which is really trying to act as a technology coalition to advocate for bringing new technology and new companies to the state of Utah, specifically for the life sciences and health tech industries.

Zach Peterson:

Okay, great. Well, we're getting up there on time, but what we'll actually do is in the show notes, we'll actually include a link over to that nonprofit so people can go learn more, and we'll also include a link over to careersinelectronics.com. Henry, thank you so much for joining me today. This has been really cool, of course, to talk about bioimpedance and everything with medical devices, but also to learn of more about the opportunities that young engineers have to volunteer in the industry and work with organizations like IPC.

Henry Crandall:

Thanks for having me on, Zach. It's been a lot of fun. Time flew by just chatting back and forth here. Yeah, it's been really fun. Thanks having me on.

Zach Peterson:

Absolutely. Anytime. To those who are listening, we've been talking with Henry Crandall, National Science Foundation graduate research fellow and PhD candidate at the University of Utah. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button, you'll be able to keep up with all of our episodes and tutorials as they come out. And last but not least, don't stop learning, stay on track, and we'll see you next time.