The start of the week was a little rocky. On Monday, we finished up all the calibration of the 3D printers and continued to print fun little trinkets. But on Tuesday, we had a very short day thanks to Tropical Storm Bill. We were assigned our teams for the first project, researched for a while, and then went home. I’m going to be working on a device to measure blood pressure for villagers! Since most people in Malawian villages are illiterate, the device must be able to allow the user to interpret the results without needing to understand the numbers. I’m super excited to make this device because it has potential to save the lives of people who may not be aware of their hypertension.

The rest of the week, we jumped back into work. My team did a lot of research and learned how to take blood pressure the old fashioned (and most reliable) way–a mechanical mercury sphygmomanometer:

We also got to learn a little bit about arduinos, since we’ll probably have to use one in our design:

 

 

Friday afternoon, we had a lot of fun! We had a workshop with a professor at Rice about scoping, or finding needs before you engineer solutions. He specializes in disabilities, and taught us that sometimes you can’t tell what the problems are until you experience them yourself. So, we got to pretend to have three different disabilities: blindness, being confined to a wheelchair, and arthrogryposis.

 

 

 

 

Overall, it was a fun week! With a bad-weather day, getting new projects, and getting to play in a wheelchair, it didn’t feel at all like work! I’m eager to get back to make more progress on our project!

 

 

In other news, last weekend at my grandma’s house we found this binder that belonged to my grandpa when he went to Rice (back when it was still called Rice Institute–and free). My mom, who also went to Rice, and I were so excited to look at it! If we looked closely on the “C”, we could see where he doodled in my grandma’s name–how cute?!