Two weeks of elaborate team discussions, interviews, and a bazillion sketches later, we have finally concluded the first round of brainstorming for our station. This week, we got to meet with Ms. Betsy Asma to further discuss the clinical needs of our devices. As we thought about our design, there were debates on the portability of the station. While it is more convenient for the station to be portable, we would risk the trade off of things going missing. After deliberate discussions, we came to a compromise with certain parts of the station being mobile, such as the potential for an additional cart. We also had an interview with Dr. Phillip Kortum regarding usability and human factors, which are extremely important to consider in our design. He really honed in on the need for simplicity and universality that can overcome even language barriers. In our interview with Vanessa Garlepp, a past intern with experiences in multiple past projects that had elements relevant to our design, we learned more about the circuitry of the safety feature for UVC usage, and also uninterrupted power supply as a candidate for our backup battery system. We also finally have the opportunity to meet with Prince, our clinical mentor, who gave us a solidified understanding of how our device will be used by the nurses, the current system in place, and other expected functions. And we finally got a picture with Jackie, our mentor!

                                                                 

After gathering all data from our literature research and interviews, along with the sketches, we were able to perform scoring matrices on our ideas. Our team had a lot of discussion on reframing our design criteria to better distinguish between our ideas and their efficiencies. Out of twelve full solutions, we chose to move forward with four ideas: the bucket building, the UFO, the ladder, and the cylindrical tower. They all take on different forms, so it would be very interesting to further explore the possibilities in the 3D space. 

                     

And now, for the most exciting part to come…seeing our ideas come to life with prototyping!! To be continued in next week’s blog 🙂

Thank you all again for tagging along with me on this wonderful journey this summer. Keep on doing the great things you’re doing and see you all next week!

Hi everyone! Week 4 of this internship has been the most packed so far. My team and I have accomplished so much on the road to our final design, and I am excited to share our progress with you all!

After weeks of interviews, planning, and brainstorming, we officially started our low-fidelity prototyping on the various joints. The first joint that we focused on was the knee. The knee is important in two Ballard examinations where the leg is extended until resistance is felt in the knee. This means that the mechanism that we implement in the knee needs to have a modular component to control its resistance. What I found fascinating about the low-fidelity prototyping process is how your expectations can contradict reality. There were so many ideas that I felt worked in my head, but they failed when I had to construct them. We low-fidelity prototyped several ideas, but the one we agreed on as the best one was a string mechanism. Specifically, the mechanism consists of a string threaded through the knee joint. One end of the thread would end with a knot while the other would be wound around a spinning dial. The spinning dial would allow users to adjust the resistance in the knee. The knee would then be screwed into a ball-joint linkage which will represent the hip.

                                                                                                  Hip and Knee Model

Another joint that we focused on was the shoulder. One of the examinations on the Ballard Score requires you to move your arm across the body. Since the shoulder is a pretty complicated joint, we were initially unsure about how we should model it to get the necessary motions. We decided to simulate the shoulder by using a wheel mechanism with a hinge joint on top of it.

                                                                                                       Shoulder Model

Besides the huge leaps that we have made with our project, week 4 has also offered me some great highlights outside of the project. My team decided that it would be great to spend some time with each other outside of the OEDK, so we decided to go to Torchy’s Tacos and get some boba as well! Since most of our conversations during work pertain to our project, it has been pretty difficult to get to know each other very well. It was great just to have the time to talk about things that didn’t have to do with engineering.

                                                                                                         Team Dinner

This week has been one of the most fulfilling weeks of the internship so far! To be honest, it was difficult to really see how this project could be done during the planning stages, but now that we are in the process of bringing our ideas to reality, it has been really great to see how our hard work is paying off!

Talk to you soon!

Lam Nguyen

 

This week was our busiest yet – with five interviews, brainstorming, and scoring our designs, we had plenty to work on. Speaking with Prince, our clinical mentor at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Malawi, was extremely helpful in solidifying our design decisions. After he expanded on how he envisioned our device, we were able to begin exploring physical prototypes through brainstorming. 

Here is our column of partially developed designs. These can be combined in one device or act as a standalone feature in the device, but the main objective was to visualize them together and draw them out before we could forget the idea. I enjoy this kind of conceptualization because I’m a visual person.

Above is our cluster of fully developed design sketches, grouped by common features. This process pushed us to explain our ideas clearly and completely think through each design. 

Now that we’ve screened and scored each device, we’re left with a few top contenders to move into low-fidelity prototyping. I’m looking forward to getting to work with the OEDK’s low-fidelity cart materials, and potentially even some hand tools. It will be cool to see our designs come to life, as ambitious as our ideas might seem on paper (or Post-It). 

Aside from prototyping, we have one more meeting lined up for next week to discuss user-interface design. We’ve already had some interesting ideas regarding an LED light display to indicate charging and sanitizing progress, among others, so it will be nice to hear feedback on those. 

Thanks for following along so far, and keep an eye out for more prototype updates next week!

Hello! Week three of this internship just ended, meaning we are already nearing the halfway point! It feels easy to dismiss the progress we have made, as these early weeks have been extremely background research and problem space oriented, but this foundation is pivotal to the success of our project. This week flew by as we had Monday off for Juneteenth. Thus far, it has been very exciting as our first week actually prototyping with our own design modifications as opposed to the exact kinetic hand model from e-NABLE. It was the first week, I made some progress on my personal goal of learning 3D modeling and CAD in fusion360.

This week we have made an extra effort into making sure that we are documenting our work every step of the way. Not only did a lot of this week revolve around finishing our design context review to ensure we had a comprehensive list on our resources and fleshed out version of our design criteria. Also, in order to be able to effectively use the little slots of time around workshops, we began making agendas. We created a general task list once at the beginning of the week, and then at the beginning of each day with more specific broken down tasks. Then at the end of the day, we went through and recorded what we actually had done. This would allow us to look back at what we had, both to have the sense of progress, for our daily standups, tech memos, and this blog!

As for prototyping, we have started to make some major progress. After some discussion, we decided that the first flaw with the original model we wanted to tackle was the thumb placement. In the original model, the thumb was placed somewhat forward, and the pad of the thumb was facing the palm of the hand to allow the hand to grab things when the fingers contracted. However, as there is no need to hold small things in basketball, the thumb in this position would prevent dribbling and need to extend outwards so the hand was in a more open palm position. Rather than creating a new model from scratch or heavily altering existing versions, we found that with two simple changes, we could mostly move the thumb into the correct position. We shaved off a part of the original palm, and angled the base of the thumb.

Finally, this week we also started testing different silicon materials to put in place for the silicon finger tips. After testing out various silicons that the OEDK already had, we tested out 2 different types and found that one of them seemed perfect for us based on a qualitative evaluation. This brings us to our plan for next week, in which we hope to do some testing to get some quantitative results to validate the changes that we have made.