Hey everyone!

Last week, our primary objectives were to become familiar with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software, begin to make modifications to the existing kinetic hand design from e-Nable, and continue researching and testing possible materials. At the beginning of the week, we participated in an introductory CAD workshop and then further familiarized ourselves with Fusion 360 and Blender using online tutorials. Finally, after all of our research and brainstorming, we began the process of making our first modifications to our base design.

The adjustments we’d like to make first are repositioning the thumb better so that there is equal contact between a basketball and each of the fingertips, improving the support provided by the wrist hinges during extension, and relocating the tensioners to maintain tension in the fingers while limiting the movement of the fingers. Since we were all fairly new to CAD, the process was slow at first, but we were able to later get the hang of it and complete the redesign of the thumb joint. (It’s sort of difficult to see in the image, but the thumb has been rotated inwards and further back on the hand.)

Later in the week, we had a very productive impromptu meeting with Dr. Grant Belton, who is one of the mentors for the smart helmet team. We were discussing various material options we were considering using while 3D printing our device, and he informed us that we could fabricate custom printed padded inserts using a lattice pattern infill and a special resin printer. This technology is already used to make helmets for NFL players and could match our intended use case very well.

Finally, as part of a low-fidelity prototyping workshop, I participated in an egg-drop contest with another team of interns. Using a design inspired by engineering influencer Mark Rober, we successfully passed the drop and won gift cards to Rice Coffeehouse!

Egg drop video!

Thanks for reading my post! See y’all next week!

Alex

Hi everyone! It is hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I am almost at the halfway point of the internship. The new experiences that I have gained by immersing myself in the design process have helped me develop a mindset of an engineer and strengthen my insights into what real global health collaboration looks like.

My team and I mainly focused on brainstorming and evaluations of possible solutions this week. Earlier in the internship, our client was able to connect us with some registered nurses and nursing students in Malawi in order to better understand our end-user population. We were able to gather their feedback through zoom meetings and Google surveys. As their responses came in, we started to revise our design criteria in order to better fit the needs of our users. Specifically, we moved appearance up on our chart since our users stressed the importance of the training model looking like an actual newborn. We also were able to get into contact with a few nurses working in the U.S. to get their perspectives on the New Ballard Score and their training on the assessment. A discrepancy that we found in these interactions is the relative importance of the Ballard Score in the United States and Malawi. While the Ballard Score is relatively well-known in Malawi, many of the clinicians in America that we contacted had little to no knowledge of the Ballard Score since we have ultrasound machines that can examine the gestational age of a baby. Discrepancies like these remind me not only of the privileges that come with living in a more developed country, but also how limited resources play a huge factor in the shaping of existing structures in other regions.

A huge highlight for the team was that our baby doll came in! Her name is Nikki Iggy Madonna Beyonce Shakira (NIMBS), and we hope that she can help empower nurses to help save newborn lives the way that the women she is named after have empowered so many people 🙂 It is going to be difficult to pick apart such a cute doll, but we are excited to start low-fidelity prototype during Week 4.

Besides the huge progress that my team and I have accomplished in designing our model, there were other huge highlights for me throughout the week. I was able to participate in multiple design workshops to develop certain engineering skills. We anticipate that 3-D printing will be an important component for our final model, so everyone on the team has been working hard on improving our Auto Fusion 360 skills in order to design parts. Working with such a novel software has been tricky to adapt to, but with each tutorial, I feel like I am able to understand more and more of the language of 3-D printing. I also was able learn how to solder a circuit as well!

 

As we progress into Week 4, we will begin low-fidelity prototyping the different mechanical joints that could possibly be used for each joint and decide on which one would work the best for our training model.

 

Team Photo

Talk to you soon!

Lam Nguyen

 

Week three kicked in, marking the almost halfway journey of the internship. Throughout the third week, our team continued interviews, our research on potential solutions and more brainstorming! As the process of brainstorming continues, I kept in mind a quote from the brainstorming workshop, “ Don’t aim for perfection, aim for excellence!” Even though I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist, sometimes I do find it difficult to not want things to be perfect. However, with the brainstorming process, personally, I have learned to put down even the craziest, most “imperfect” ideas. I also learned that creativity and innovation can appear at the most random time, as ideas don’t just come within one sitting. It was interesting for me to notice how I started becoming more conscious of my surroundings, trying to make connections to my project.  

This week we also got the opportunity to attend a low-fidelity prototyping workshop. In lo-fi prototyping, as they call it, the same principles can be applied. As our practice was on an egg drop, I think it is fitting to say we aimed for eggcellence, not perfection this time around. Just in 10 minutes, we finished our prototype, focused on the function, not perfecting minute details about how it looks. And that’s the beauty of lo-fi prototyping, the rapidness, the imperfections, building a tangible concept to see if an idea, previously on paper, would actually make sense in the 3D world. Upon hearing the assignment of building a mechanism that would protect an egg in a drop, I immediately thought of building a parachute, but my team was quick to build a protective layer of balloons. I wanted to reinforce our design by adding the parachute, but in the end, the results showed that the addition would have been unnecessary. Our egg was protected and we won a Rice Coffeehouse gift card! Upon reflection, I learned that simplicity is very important, especially in engineering design. A more simple design would be more intuitive and easier to use, and while looks are important, functions should be nailed down first and foremost. 

                                     

I will continue to apply the lessons I took from the workshop to our team project. Lo-fi prototyping is very fun and I highly suggest you all to use it to take your ideas to life, even for personal projects! 

 

As always, thank you for following my journey this summer. I hope to see all of you again next week! Continue to achieve eggcellence! (I will stop with the egg pun now 🙂

Hi everyone! We were able to make a lot of progress in our background research and informational interviews this week, which will be very helpful moving forward into brainstorming and prototyping. With the information from our interviews, we revised our initial list of design criteria and began thinking about how to set measurable goals for our prototype at the showcase. In line with our own motivations and with the request of our clients, we are ultimately aiming to create a conceptual prototype that will supplement the research deliverables we are developing. This will focus largely on form, and could potentially involve multiple prototypes. I’m glad that we have some additional clarity on what our final project will look like, since at first we were unsure whether we wanted to focus more on the research aspect of the problem. 

Along with refining our design criteria, we also completed our spreadsheet for NEST Bundle device specs, which organizes all the project-relevant information for each device in the bundle. We also created our benchmarking spreadsheet per Abby’s example (thank you Abby!) and organized each device into Charging, Sanitizing and Storing categories. Most excitingly, we continued brainstorming and sketching initial ideas and discussing design alternatives. Although we’re still in the very early stages of picturing what our device might look like, it’s been interesting to discuss certain features with the team. Examples of proposed components include removable or interchangeable cords, multiple USB ports per compartment, dividers or adjustable sections within the device, and a glass cover that will protect users from UVC light but also allow them visibility into the container. More to come on these features! 

Next week, we’ll have meetings with various Rice and Rice360-affiliated professionals, which is exciting. We will also be meeting Prince, a nurse in Malawi who advises many Rice360 and NEST360 projects. His clinical experience is extremely valuable, and I’m looking forward to applying it to our design sketches to create a more intuitive and useful device.

As another update, the low-fidelity prototype workshop from this week was as fun as I had hoped – we got to create prototypes in teams for a mechanism that would keep an egg from cracking after being dropped. Teams that were able to protect the egg won a Coffeehouse gift card – unfortunately my team’s egg cracked, but we’ll get ‘em next time.

That’s all for now! Until next time.

 

Hey everyone! This week has been packed with meetings, workshops and design analysis for our project. Despite how busy it was, the week seemed to fly by quickly. We met with members of the senior design team who worked on this project last year, Team EPIWATER. To prepare for the meeting, we read their final report (which is almost 90 pages long!) in addition to all their documentation in their Team Drive. Even though it was very time consuming, it was very informative and helpful for our team to understand our role in the project. It was really cool to learn about how they went through the design process when we met with them and why they made certain choices for the project. I also thought their team was an inspiring example of how successful interdisciplinary teams can be. 

After meeting with other people, such as Dr. Fowotade, a distinguished clinical virologist at the University of Ibadan, and Zach LaTurner, a PhD student at Rice, our team decided we were ready to move forward in the design analysis stage. We decomposed our design challenge problem into ten different functions aspects and used that information, along with our project research and client needs, to come up with our design criteria, which we then ranked using a pairwise comparison chart.

Ranked Design Criteria:

1. Sustainability: Durability of time sustainable energy source can power the device
2. Durability: Ability to withstand dust and rain and various stress/crash tests
3. Maintenance: Accessibility of device to be repaired easily
4. Portability: Dry weight and volume restrictions
5. Ease of Use: For setup and operating the user interface
6. Replicability: Ease of recreating the device 
7. User Interface: Monitored controls display values from sensors to establish recording

While these rankings are preliminary and may change based on further discussions and client meetings, they give us a good idea of what our team needs to focus on this summer. I had never done a problem decomposition before and initially didn’t fully understand how it relates to moving forward in the design process. However, it turned out that the design criteria that we chose and how we ranked them was informed by our decomposition. Even though we haven’t started brainstorming yet, I can already see how it will make that process simpler because we can break down our ideas based on specific design blocks. 

In addition to working on our project, we also has several workshops throughout the week. The morning workshops focused primarily on the design analysis stages, which was a good refresher. My favorite activity from those workshops was during the brainstorming workshop when Mr. Fletcher asked us to come up with non-solutions a.k.a ideas that don’t address the purpose of a product; hearing what my colleagues and I wrote at the end was hilarious!

We also had two workshops from Associate Dean Catherine Clark on difficult conversations and microaggressions. She emphasized the importance of having difficult conversations and gave us strategies on approaching them, which I think will be useful in both my personal and professional life. She also discussed the prevalence of microaggressions and how they’re perpetuated and how they can be harmful, despite being unintentional. This workshop was very impactful and reminded me to be aware of my biases and recognize them so that I can stop myself from saying something that could hurt someone else. 

This week was a rollercoaster from start to finish. This week we spent a lot of time in technical and interpersonal workshops, refining design criteria, and actually prototyping! Overall, the week felt very productive and I am confident that we managed to set up a deep understanding of our problem space and direction for the upcoming weeks. Some of the workshops we had covered things I would initially have thought were more relevant to personal development rather than a technical design project based internship, such as how to have difficult conversations and microagressions. I thought these workshops were teaching us things that were only minimally relevant in comparison to other technically relevant topics. But soon after the workshops I realized they protect one of the most valuable things that we are getting from this internship: our relationships, connections and workability with other people in the community.

This week, we made three different sizes of the kinetic hand model from the e-NABLE network, as suggested to us by Arinze. After our hyrdocal cast model from the previous week came out extremely still damp and crumbly, we knew we would have to meet up with Eric Jr. again to recast. After running another test mold, we developed a much better process to follow for our meeting on Friday. A lot of the changes we made were common sense, and came from spending a little more time reading the instructions on the container. I realized, even though we had done a little bit of research and experimentation, in our rush to move onto prototyping and researching, we ended up having to spend even more time on it. Next time it would be more time efficient to spend a little bit more time planning something initially the first time to prevent possibly having to redo it later. We learned how to 3D print with different materials such as PLA, TPU, and ninja flex.

Our week closed with another meeting with Eric Jr., his father, grandma and two younger brothers. His father reiterated to us the hand was to be used specifically for basketball rather than daily life. His philosophy in doing so was that in having been born with one hand, Eric Jr. wouldn’t become more efficient with two hands in the same way that we, born with two hands, wouldn’t know how to use a third. This comparison definitely helped spark understanding and thoughts of why we feel the need to “modify” differently abled people to get as close to “normal standard as possible.” This meeting also gave us some extra insight into our models and what and where we would need to iterate the following week. We learned that the 60% size was the closest fit, and that the hand would need extra reinforcements to protect and strengthen his wrist on his left hand. Additionally, we reaffirmed our thoughts of moving the thumb out of center and more to the side in an open hand position. Overall, meeting Eric again was such a delight again and has fueled me once again to get him the best prosthetic possible by the end of this internship!

This week went by so quickly! After meeting with our mentor Jackie last Friday, we got to work making a spreadsheet of questions for the Rice360 Fellows. With Jackie’s help, we were able to refine and rephrase our questions, and they were ready to be shared with some Fellows by mid-week. We met with Josh and Sonia to hear about their clinical experiences at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Blantyre, Malawi. Their insights have been extremely valuable, and have definitely helped us gain a clearer understanding of the existing issue and demand for a solution. Aside from conducting interviews, we continued compiling information by researching UVC sanitization, implementation of wireless charging, available power resources, and similar existing solutions. While we brainstormed broad form options, we outlined potential design criteria and considered how to rank them moving forward. 

In addition to our ongoing background research, it’s been a very workshop-intensive week. I’ve been able to learn many new skills, including breadboarding and 3D printing using Fusion. I particularly liked Lady Catherine’s workshops on microaggressions and having difficult conversations. Since the internship started, I’ve been looking forward to these workshops so that I can expand my skill set in engineering topics, and learn new concepts that I might not come across in my typical coursework for the Health Sciences major. 

Our main challenge this week has been balancing various components of the internship – with all the important workshops scheduled for this week, we had less time to work on our project. However, we were still able to make progress in our research. Next week, we hope to reach out to additional contacts to hear their insights, including previous Rice360 teams with similar designs regarding backup energy sources and UVC usage. I’m looking forward to our upcoming low-fidelity prototyping workshop, as well as our group social at Bayou Bend. Until next week! 

Hello everyone! It’s hard to believe that I have ended my 2nd week of the internship. It is incredible to think about how fast time flies when you are engrossed in whatever you are doing. This week, my team and I took time to think through the logistics of our project in preparation for low-fidelity prototyping during week 3.

At the beginning of the week, we developed a set of design criteria for our project. The design criteria are the targets and goals that will define the characteristics of our design. We developed these goals by first defining the basic user needs of our project such as safety, ease of use, durability, appearance, etc. We then categorized these user needs by whether they were constraints and objectives. For the more quantitative user needs, we developed quantitative target values for each criterion, and for the qualitative objectives, we designed user-defined scales.

After developing our design criteria, we then took our project idea and decomposed it into parts. Specifically, we first broke the design idea into the joints that we have to model. We then further decomposed each joint into the movements that they have to properly simulate for the Ballard Assessment. Building our design criteria and decomposing our project idea into the specific components/details helped me develop an idea of the scope of our project and the aspects that need to be addressed. A concern that I had during week 1 was just how big and complex our project looked from the outside. As someone who does not have any sort of engineering background, the idea of having to design a model that can perform these complicated physical motions was overwhelming, but having the opportunity to firmly establish what this model needs to have characteristically and what are the various components that need to be worked on was really integral in me being able to understand what this project truly entails.

The last design task we did at the end of the week was brainstorming all of the possible solutions to our problem. While my team and I already had a clear idea about what the prototype would look like, it was really refreshing to be able to sit down and just come up with ideas even if we knew that a lot of them would not come to fruition. Something that I sometimes find myself struggling with is how narrow-minded I can be when it comes to problem-solving. When I encounter a problem, I get into the habit of putting all of my effort into the solution that comes to me first rather than assessing the situation at hand and taking my time to develop a well-thought-out solution. Forcing myself to come up with multiple alternatives to our mannikin idea helped keep my mind open.

While my team and I made a lot of progress in the design process, several highlights for us were the various workshops that we participated in throughout the week. I had a lot of fun learning how to breadboard circuits and work with 3-D printing software in the design workshops. Even though I don’t see myself heavily utilizing these skills within my actual project, it was great to just be able to sink my feet into territory I have never approached and even apply the physics knowledge that I learned in the classroom. Furthermore, I really enjoyed the professional workshops on engaging in difficult conversations and addressing microaggressions. Effective interpersonal communication is a skill that I have struggled with for quite some time, so it was great just to be able to have the time to walk through how to approach difficult professional situations.

Overall, I am really proud of the progress my team and I have made within and outside the engineering design process. Since we have been focused on researching the problem context and working out the logistics of our project, we haven’t encounter a lot of challenges, but I do anticipate barriers in our progress during week 3 as we start to do our low-fidelity prototype. I am looking forward to updating everyone on my team’s progress in the upcoming week!

 

Take care,

Lam