Hi everyone! My name is Shreya Jindal and I’m so excited to be interning at Rice 360 this summer. I am a rising junior at Hanszen College, and majoring in bioengineering. I am particularly interested in sustainable/longlasting design and committed to bringing this into our project this summer. Last semester, I took a course BIOE 360: Appropriate Design in Global Health, which helped foster my interest in needs finding and design for global communities. I was extremely interested in continuing my growth and understanding of working on projects in these spaces and thought that this internship would be the perfect place to do so.

Our project this summer is designing a 3D printed prosthetic hand for Eric Jr, an extremely high energy six year old with a love for basketball. We plan for our designs to be modified specifically to allow Eric Jr. to play basketball from one of our project head organization e-NABLE’s database of prosthetic models. My teammates, JJ and Alex, and I are super excited to be working on this project for which has a very immediate impact.

Something that I feel like I’ve missed in a lot of my design coursework is direct interaction and collaboration with users from the beginning to the end of the design process. I am so excited to say that within the first week, we’ve already met with and learned so much from Eric Jr. We briefly played basketball with him outside and he showed us his very impressive moves. We finished off the day making a mold of his smaller hand to eventually use to fit and size the prosthetic. Later in the week, we interviewed Arinze, who has a lot of experience working with e-NABLE models. Next week, we plan to do a lot of background research, determine our design criteria, and get started on some solution brainstorming.