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NOVEMBER 2018 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 13 Figure 4: Students visit Jabil's Blue Sky Center to learn about manufacturing processes and careers in the advanced manufacturing sector. (Source: NextFlex) ly around a baby's arm while sleeping that mea- sures movements, oxygen, and heart rate, al- lowing parents to rest easier. Another example is the Relieve Sleeve—a pain reliever designed to alleviate joint pain and stiffness associated with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) that adminis- ters heat sensations and applies electric pulses tailored to a user's needs. These functions are embedded in a compression sleeve for easy ap- plication around joints and muscles. Another creative application is Asthmex—a chest band with a smart patch to detect asthma symptoms and administer medication via an autoinjector, which helps everyone from student athletes to Olympic athletes with asthma to compete. FlexFactor alumnus Tate Morillo from Wil- low Glen High School in San Jose, Califor- nia, worked with his team to conceptualize an implantable glucose monitor for diabetes pa- tients that would alert users in real time to take insulin by pushing notifications to a paired cellphone. The device would be pow- ered by low-flow hydroelectric power harvest- ed from blood flow. Tate explained, "My impetus for creating such a concept stemmed from first-hand ex- perience with my diabetic father's struggles. Watching him checking his glucose levels as a child scared me, and I felt that there must be a better solution to this problem. Already being a large burden on the individual, diabe- tes seems to consume the lives of people, con- trolling how they eat, their energy levels, and the way they must live their lives. As a son, I wanted to do everything in my power to make the way this problem was treated easier, more convenient, and less painful for my father. The most important lesson I learned from FlexFac- tor was that the youth's ideas should not be ig- nored, but nurtured. Without influencing the young minds of today, students may never find their passion or become the inventors of to- morrow, thus changing the path of technologi- cal development and history." The program layers onto an existing class and requires students to work in teams to iden- tify a real-world problem, conceptualize an ad- vanced hardware solution, and build a busi- ness model around it. At the end of the pro- gram, students pitch their ideas "Shark-Tank style" to a panel of representatives, highlight- ing how they have considered both technical features and market needs to solve the prob- lem they identified. The program's agile frame- work allows it to work in a wide range of sub- ject areas, including topics like English and fashion design, allowing it to engage new pop- ulations of students with the advanced manu- facturing sector instead of only students who have already self-selected STEM pathways. NextFlex launched the pilot of FlexFactor in the fall of 2016 with eight students, and by the