Even though this week was short because of the Fourth of July, we made a lot of progress! We consolidated our circuit for the blood pressure monitor onto one bread board, which was more challenging than we anticipated. We spent all of Monday and part of Tuesday troubleshooting, only to find that one of our parts (the current amplifier) was faulty.

Once we finally fixed it, we could move along. We were able to install five LEDs that light up based on the pressure. For example, pressures that are unhealthily low, the blue LED is lit. The red LED lights up when the pressure is extremely high. Here are our LEDs:

 

At the end of the week, we were able to install a cuff and a manual pump that allows us to actually take blood pressure. However, since we don’t yet have a way for the arduino to know when to take a pressure reading (based on Korotkoff sounds), at this point it is still up to the user to listen to the pulse sounds. At appropriate Korotkoff sounds, the user can look at the LCD or the LEDs to see the numerical pressure value as well as its severity.

This week, our goal is to integrate the pulse sensor into our design and begin testing. We don’t have the sensor yet, but once it arrives, we will be able to use it to listen to Korotkoff sounds and thus tell the arduino when to take pressure readings. By the end of the week, we should have a working prototype that we can begin testing (by comparing the readings our device gives to the readings of a mercury sphygmomanometer).

 

In the past week I joined Mikaela and Leah on the mechanical breast pump project.

The project was in the prototyping phase so thats what we did for most of the week- work on simple prototype parts for the pump. We worked on few prototypes for the suction part of the mechanism and one of the prototypes could actually pump. At this stage of prototyping we were not expecting any parts to function so it was a pleasant surprise to see one of them actually sucking air!

As part of the process we also worked on prototyping a one way valve- which was slightly more difficult. A one way valve is a remarkably simple component but when you are trying to make one from low cost and readily available materials it becomes a bit tricky. We are still thinking on that one.

Indeed low cost is clearly  a very important aspect of all the projects we are working on this summer.Defining what exactly “low cost”  means to a project is sometimes not so obvious. Especially with this project as we were trying to purchase parts for our prototypes we had to clarify  alot of things. Some of the questions that we had to ask ourselves included:

Will this pump be low cost to an individual person or low cost to a hospital?

how do prices in the USA compare to the prices in Malawi ?

Which parts of the machine do we want to be reusable and which do we want to be fixed and how does that affect our cost?

I say that we were asking ourselves but generally I was the one to come up with answers- being the only Malawian in the group. Some of the questions I could readily answer but others required me to do a lot of thinking. It is surprising how many differences there are between what and how things are purchased here in the United states and back home in Malawi.

Actually, this whole experience has highlighted how many things which we assume are constant across all countries which actually are not, what is reassuring however is that one will notice commonalities to amongst people which usually outnumber the differences.

For example, it was nice to celebrate independence on the fourth of July on Saturday here in the States knowing that Malawians are also enjoying an independence day weekend with ours falling on the Sixth of July on Monday.

The week was short but my group and I still decided to use it to its fullest. In this week, we were modifying our code for the blood pressure monitor machine and our goal for the week was to produce a simple prototype that would demonstrate the basic operations of the machine.

We also ordered the components we need for this project so far and we expect them to be in by early next week.

Through the hard work the team put, it was not surprising that this goal was met and thus the week was a successful week.

I hope the coming week will be as productive as this week was.

Many changes have occurred here at the OEDK the last few weeks. The technology team has gone through a large turnover, and we now have 3 new members (not including myself). Becky, Erica, and Mary Kate are taking over for the Breath Alert, AutoSyP, and IncuBaby, respectively. In fact, of the 5 other team members, only 2 will be the same when I leave as when I arrived. Former technology team members are going to medical school or beginning work abroad, and Fall is often the start of such ventures.

All of this coming and going means a few things. First, it means a lot of goodbye lunches (yum!), but, more importantly, it means that there has been a great deal of knowledge transfer lately. It’s so important that each of the new tech team members fully understand the technology they are working on, including the device’s history, how to build it, its most common malfunctions, and what future work must be completed on the device.

On Monday, the whole technology team sat in on a presentation of an overview of Rice360. We discussed the history of the organization, key members at Rice and at QECH in Malawi, past technologies, and current projects. Though I already knew about many of the projects (and even presented about IncuBaby), I learned a great deal about the history of the organization and about QECH. It was a really good opportunity to understand the full scope of Rice360 and the work we do. I’m experienced with the technology team, but there is so much work beyond the technologies that must be done to actually implement the devices. I gained an even greater appreciation for this organization and how far it has come.

On a smaller scale, Mary Kate and I have also been working a great deal on knowledge transfer. I’ll be leaving Houston at the end of July, and before I leave, it is important that Mary Kate fully understands the incubator and its quirks.  She and I have perused the CAD files for the device, we’ve discussed various design decisions that led to the current device, we explored the code and the circuit (with help from my senior design teammate, Caleb), and we’ve made a thorough to-do list that will guide the next few months of work on the incubator.

I’ve done my best to provide Mary Kate with a number of resources so that she will be fully equipped to take on the incubator project, and I’m confident that she’ll do a great job in these coming months!

Week Four: July 1st, 2015

Mikaela Juzswik

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Hi, I’m completely on time with this blog post. Things have been incredibly busy down here, but in a great way—we’ve got a lot of traction now, and our team is really starting to take off! Design solutions ahoy!

Last week, in the not-so-extant wake of Tropical Storm Bill, Leah and I began brainstorming. In the spirit of engineering and brainstorming, we decided that no idea is truly too infeasible, dangerous, or utterly horrible to be considered unusable, so we got a lot of interesting ideas, for lack of a better word. These ideas include using pizza boxes to create a giant suctioning vortex, building a large freezer that would serve as a condenser, and an idea that I only described using the word ‘trees,’ whose significance (probably thankfully) been forgotten. Yes, most of these ideas were thought of during lunch, when we were sitting under trees, eating pizza, and using icepacks.

Far more important, however, is the great news—in the process of generating some truly terrifying ideas, Leah and I found a bunch of promising gems.

In the past week, we’ve mostly been focusing on ways to generate pressure—the breast pump, naturally must provide suction, but we also need ways for it to release that pressure. In other words, lactation is not caused by constant suction on the breasts; rather, the suction simulates the suckling of the baby, causing the milk to be expressed. Devices such as bike pumps only have one direction of airflow, so we had to expand our horizons a bit. Methods of generating pressure (and applied in strange ways) included squirtbottles, mechanical bellows, syringes, various household objects such as bottles used as diaphragms, nesting objects with springs, peristaltic pumps, and re-invented aquarium pumps.

We also began to foray into ways to optimize user comfort. Previous complains about mechanical breast pumps suggest that they’re too tiring on the hands—after all, they entail repeating the same crimping motion thirty to sixty times per minute for thirty minutes. We tried to incorporate more natural body motions into our design, such as riding a bicycle, using a foot pedal, sitting in a rocking chair, and even shifting body weight.

In total, we generated about thirty unique ideas, which we began narrowing down using screening and scoring matrices, tools used to decide which ideas are optimized based on a set of internal design criteria. The screening matrix proved easier said than done, and we got a little delayed from our weekly goals of selecting a prototype to design. Initially, the final optimal designs that we received from our scoring matrix didn’t match up with our vision of the project—in other words, ideas that we thought were fairly good weren’t scoring very well on the matrix, while ideas that we didn’t prefer were receiving markedly higher scores.

[pictured above: the culprit, condensed for your viewing pleasure]

After speaking with Dr. Wettergreen, we found that we needed to reconsider our weighting for the design criteria: a lot of the issue was rooted in the fact that our weightings caused the matrix to score low-cost designs much higher than high-comfort designs, allowing cheap designs that could be potentially dangerously uncomfortable to rise to the top. After re-weighting our criteria on Friday, we looked forward to having a much more promising crop of results from our scoring and screening matrices.

In other news, Harrison and I put the finishing touches on the Intubox! The whole thing looks quite solid, and I ended up taking a hit for the team when we needed to determine the attaching power of industrial-strength superglue.

Turns out it can support a hammer attached to a human finger. The good news was this indicated that the glue would be of sufficient strength to attach key components of our box (such as feet and magnets); the bad news was this indicated that I’d accidentally glued a hammer to my hand.