The whole process of completing the project for Integrated Design Project (IDP) during this semester has gone way beyond our expectation due to the pandemic issue and Movement Control Order (MCO) implemented by the government. Throughout the whole journey, there were some good lessons and benefits that we gained in that are probably hard for us to have in short amount of time outside this course. However, we also wanted to highlight some big problems and challenges encountered throughout the project completion.

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          Talking about the benefits first, the most important lesson that we learnt at the end of this course was the ability to manage time and implement multi-tasking efficiently despite being under pressure especially with the tight and busy schedule during this semester. Aside from that, the abundant technical and engineering knowledges and experiences that we gained throughout the whole research and project development process had helped us a lot as an engineering student as most of them are not available in the syllabus in the class. With our project almost at a close, it is safe to say that our group has successfully handled electronic engineering and computer science topics despite not being able to develop an actual engineering prototype. We have always been interested in computer science and with high hopes of it becoming our major, we were very intrigued when a real-world problem arose. We were familiar with coding in C++ and Python, but we never used development environments such as Arduino in the class before. This program was very beneficial to our project as we needed a microprocessor or microcontroller to perform certain actions. Since Arduino is a user-friendly and open source prototyping platform, this was perfect for our project. We were unfamiliar with this topic at first, but with thousands of help pages and studies done through various sites and online platforms, we were able to easily learn the materials and integrate them into our project.

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          For the challenges part, we believed that the biggest challenge we faced was the limitations related to the prototype building since the main concept of our first project idea was to implement image processing through thermal imaging technology. The limitations involved here were budget limitation due to the high price of the thermal camera module needed for the project and also the movement limitation due to the MCO which had restricted us from gaining access to labs and workshops to complete our prototype. Another problem that we encountered was the complexity of our image processing simulation which existed due to the unavailability of the thermal camera module. Without any actual live thermal image input, we found that it was harder to generate simulation just based on static images or even videos obtained from web. Therefore, we decided to proceed to reduce the complexity of our project by changing the input parameters to the subject body temperature and motion by using laser temperature sensor and PIR motion sensor instead of thermal image analysis.

 

           With that being said, we believed that if we had longer preparation time for the project development plus the right access to relevant tools and components, the final output of our project would be much better compared to current one. However, it is also to our belief that this type of situation is also a reflection of real-life crisis that commonly occurs in engineering related field in which it is our responsibility to think and devise the most feasible solution to counter the problem. Therefore, we have no regret reaching end of the process as the lessons and experiences gained are more valuable than the result itself.