Week two: June 17, 2016
Lucas Gutembergue da Costa
This week we finished the Engineering Design Bootcamp, generated the prototypes for the anteater enrichment device and started working on my major project for the summer. After going through the bootcamp I feel much more comfortable with the Engineering Design Process and feel prepared to use this method on real world problems.
As part of the bootcamp we developed prototypes for anteaters enrichment devices, my team the antSLAM came up with a very nice idea, the Fency Feast, that is explained in this video:
Video 1: Brief explanation on the Fency Feast
As a next step we improved our design to a medium fidelity prototype. The Fency Feast is composed of a support plate attached to the fence with zip ties, this plate has a hole where you can screw a transparent plastic bottle. The transparent bottles will be filled with food by the zookeepers and screwed to support plate. This way the anteater will use their tongues to eat the pellets as they would do in nature and the visitors would be able to see the anteater’s tongue.
Figure 1 and 2: Medium fidelity prototype of the Fency Feast
We had the chance to do some preliminary testing on the solution and it has very promising results, as an example we did a setup time trial and the Fency Feast took only 12 seconds to be set up, as shown on the video:
Video 2: Setup procedure for the Fency Feast.
After the medium fidelity prototype, the anteater project was put in hold until we can talk to the zookeepers to get their feedback and possibly test the device.
On Thursday we were divided in different teams, this time to work on the major project for the summer. My team is the Team Toco and our goal is to design an low-cost tocodynamometer to be used in developing settings. A tocodynamometer is a device used to measure the uterine contraction of a pregnant woman during labor, the devices currently in the market are too costly and very uncomfortable for the user. Dr. Carns, a researcher at the BRC, brought to us a very interesting concept that would be able to measure the uterine contraction optically. She made a low-fidelity prototype as proof of concept, brought it to us and we discussed about the needs, challeges and goals of the design.
Figure 3: Proof of concept of the optical tocodynamometer (optoco)
The optoco is attached to the woman’s belly and as the uterine contractions happen the device is stretched, separating two optical cable pieces and reducing the intensity of light that goes trough the device. The way the the intensity of light can be correlated to uterine contractions.
We are still in the early stages of this project, so far we have talked to Dr. Carns and researched on the background and simliar solutions for this problem, so more details will come on the next posts.
In addition to working on those two projects, this week we had 3 workshops, one on Computer Aided Design, one on 3D printing and one disassemble workshop.
Figure 4: Happy team taking a printer apart
In conclusion, I enjoyed a lot this week, I feel very proud of the Fency Feast and very excited about the Optoco.
Thanks for your attention and see you on the next post!