As I sit at my kitchen table, taking a break from today’s Father’s Day festivities and reflecting on the week, I’m starting to appreciate the virtual nature of the internship. While I would love to be in Malawi right now, there’s part of me that is happy I can share my experiences with my family each day at dinner, and can take a break from work by playing a Father’s Day badminton tournament. My dad asked me a few days ago what this week entailed, and when I thought about that, I realized how much work our team got done this week.
We started off the week with a workshop on prototyping advice from Dr. Wettergreen, a professor at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen at Rice. His work was really insightful for our group, and made us think more critically about the prototypes we had. By filling out the prototype evaluations, we realized the basic functions that the devices must satisfy, and whether they currently meet them.
For the UVC sterilization system (arguably the prototype that is currently the most challenging for us to improve), we found that the main concerns lie in testing the effectiveness of the system. While a lot of the basic functions are certainly met in theory, like disinfection while maintaining the proper filtration on the masks, our team felt it was necessary to do more evaluation to show that the system truly works. We threw around a lot of ideas at this point for how to go about proving that the system truly disinfects the masks. Literature currently says that UVC rays kill the COVID-19 virus, but how do we know that this particular system does too? Additionally, we want to implement a test to show that after disinfection, the mask filters still function properly and filter out the necessary aerosol particles. This seemed like a daunting task, as we felt that a lot of the tools we needed to complete these tests would cost a lot of money, and cost is already a concern with this system.
As for the face shields, our second prototype, I did think our team had a good grasp on the drawbacks of the current technology — the materials used. The underlying concern with the current foam-based prototype is that it’s not easily disinfected. However, clinicians love these shields because they’re so comfortable. Do we replace the foam, and find a different material? Or do we stick with the foam, but find an innovative way to reuse the materials? We again tried to spew out as many ideas as we could, and the focus of the next day’s workshop was a major help in that: problem decomposition.
Although I am familiar with the engineering design process, problem decomposition was something I hadn’t been exposed to before. In theory this is quite simple; breaking down a big problem into more tractable smaller pieces and functions. In practice, though, it was much harder than I thought. We started by defining our inputs (the users) and the outputs (the end goal of the technology). Then, we created a user flowchart, and using that, generated a few main mechanisms that each technology had to satisfy. Based on those mechanisms, the team finally started brainstorming prototype improvements.
Honestly, by now, we had already bounced around so many ideas that a lot of our ideas were incredibly similar. However, my favorite part of brainstorming, always, is hearing the “out there” ideas from team members. It prompts a lot of great thinking, but I also think it makes the process a lot more fun and engaging for all members. Plus, brainstorming lets the creative parts of ourselves go wild, which is always exciting. One highlight from our brainstorming was when we came up with a cheap smell test to prove that the disinfected N95 masks will still filter particles effectively — if a smelly chemical is sprayed near a person wearing an N95 mask and that person cannot smell the chemical, then the mask filters effectively!
As a whole, I learned so much this week, and I truly feel like I have a much better understanding about each of the two technologies. On a more personal note, some of my favorite moments this week come from our team’s daily end-of-meeting hangout sessions. We all turn on our videos, stop screen sharing documents with our research, and just talk about our days. On Friday we all talked for an hour about our favorite musicians, and started sending each other song recommendations (we’re toying with the idea of creating a joint Spotify playlist!) — it was super cool to see the different music from totally different cultures, like local Malawian music, Spanish music, and English music. All this bonding has clearly paid off, as seen when we killed it during the “fun facts” game the TAs set up this Saturday. Favorite colors, hidden talents, spirit animals — it was all covered, and we all (in my opinion) guessed each other’s answers pretty well!
It’s hard to believe the internship is already a third of the way through, but I’m so excited for the coming weeks. My team is awesome, the projects are so timely and interesting, and the workshops are really educational. Mostly, though, I can’t wait for more Team PPE end-of-meeting hangouts.
-Bhavya 🙂