Alumni take first place in Biomedical Engineering Society design competition
Group’s invention detects presence of peanut allergens in under a minute
Three alumni of the Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis won first place at the 2025 Medtronic/Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Student Design Competition held in San Diego Oct. 8-11.
Myles (Max) Miller, Nicolas Chicoine and Cameron Freeman, who earned their bachelor’s degrees in biomedical engineering in May 2025, presented their BME Day-winning senior design project from BME 401 in the chemical/biological track of the competition.
Their invention, Selective Electronic peaNut Sensing Entity (SENSE), is a portable device designed to detect latent peanut presence in foods, helping people avoid exposure to allergens that could endanger them. Hovered over food, SENSE scans for peanut presence and displays results on a smartphone application in under a minute. It has achieved very high accuracy during testing. The group’s faculty adviser was Barani Raman, the Dennis & Barbara Kessler Professor of Biomedical Engineering.
The competition included four tracks: mechanical/electrical, electrical/computer science, chemical/biological and AI/ML related to patient disease diagnostics.
BMES serves as the lead society and professional home for biomedical engineers and bioengineers. The annual student design competition gives students the opportunity to showcase their technical skills in front of Medtronic representatives and BMES members by creating and engineering innovative designs. It also provides students with a chance to network with product development and design professionals in the BME industry.
This is the second recognition the team has received in as many months. The team was a finalist in the National Inventors Hall of Fame's Collegiate Inventors Competition (CIC). The finalists will present their inventions Oct. 16 to a panel of final-round judges composed of influential inventors and invention experts including National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductees and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officials.
