hello all,

This week has been very wonderful, I remember how i mentioned and briefly explained on Team Toco’s ( Lucas, Zach , Nathalie and myself) New project.

Team Toco

From the proof of concept which doctor Carns explained to us we were most likely to base our solutions around the specified materials and that is what we did. This week we continued with research , then we  set our design criteria, brain stormed  and moved on to Pugh Scoring Matrices where we ended up with three solutions which are a bit similar but maintained them so that we test the solutions. All the processes  we went through stated above were for the attachment of the Tocodynamometer.  We started out with the attachment first because we thought it wise to do so.On Wednesday we  came up with the attachment part of the our  prototype.Which consists of two lazer cut boxes, which now holds the electronic components. The boxes are attached to each other through the latex glove which is the only stretchy material we have for now since our orders are  not yet in. We worked on the electronics part of the project as well.We used arduino to come up with the Circuit and the display of the light intensity values.We had workshop for arduino basics, soldering ,electronics (group 1) and lazer cutting(group 2) that was  on Tuesday .We were put in teams of two one in group one and the other in the second group.I was paired up with Allie, so i soldered a sound sensitive light

and Allie made a a lazer cut box for it.So from the workshop we had we used that knowledge on our group to come up with the circuit for our fairly medium fidelity prototype. So the box on the left consists of an LED which is powered up with a 9 volt battery  and has a switch taped outside the box. On the right is a soldered circuit consisting of a photo resistor which will change in resistance depending on the amount of light it receives as the elastic stretches due to contractions.The wires protruding out of the box are connected to the arduino for display of the values of light levels through the code we came up with. Below is the picture of the prototype!!

So far the tocodynamometer prototype  is able to pick up any movement of the belly which includes breathing . So we will be  working on a code which will separate the two, display the values in form of a graph, duration of one contraction etc, and should have an alarm when the three conditions below happen;

>5 contractions in 10 minutes

One contraction >120 secs

<60 second intervals

We will work on its accuracy, so there is a lot to come. Earlier today we continued with our workshop we started on Tuesday, learnt about tools, using the right ones always for each job, reading instructions before using anything.We learnt how to spray paint. Furnish wood etc.

 I also remembered today we were introduced to a minor project . It is about a device that is to measure the temperature of newly born babies which are susceptible to hypothermia.The device has three LED s each depending on the color can tell if a child is cold , OK or hot.Our scope is to do with  the user interface and aesthetics. We all had a meeting with the client. #nice weekend to all of you#