After having Monday off for the 4th of July, Team Toco made good progress the rest of the week. On Tuesday, we spent most of the day prototyping and testing our two ideas for the mechanical aspect of the toco: the rubber accordion and the sewing elastic (pictured below). We soldered a new photoresistor circuit for the accordion box, and spent most of the afternoon testing out the two devices on ourselves. To test, we taped the device to our stomachs and tried to see if we could detect breathing — turns out we can pretty reliably! However, our testing also uncovered some new problems we’ve been working to address. The two pieces of fiber optic cable don’s always come back together completely when the stomach relaxes. After some trial and error, we were able to solve this on the elastic box by cutting the elastic to be both shorter and not as wide.
Wednesday morning we met with Dr. Carns to show her our progress so far and get her feedback and advice on our next steps. She also gave us some new, more flexible fiber optic cable to try out in our device so we can replace the brittle fiber we’ve been using so far. All of Wednesday afternoon, we spent back at the OEDK doing a needs finding workshop with Dr. Ghosn from the BIOE department. We talked about different ways to find and clarify needs, and discussed some of the needs around Rice campus. Then we went through some activities: we tried to maneuver into and around the OEDK while in a wheelchair, and then while blindfolded and using a walking stick. It was a really fascinating workshop and made me think more about some of the difficulties people face just getting around campus, and how good design can make that experience better.
On Thursday, we had some more time away from the OEDK — this time to stain the treehouse that was built for an ENGI 120/200 project last year. It ended up looking awesome, and was a great way to spend the morning!
Thursday afternoon and all of today we spent working more on our prototype. We’ve completed a belt to replace the athletic tape that we’ve been using to attach the device to the body up until now. Today, we also had some big news — we 3D printed the first component for the high fidelity version of our boxes! I got a crash course in Solidworks while we made the CAD files of the boxes, and we ended up with a 3D printed piece that made it much easier to attach and remove the electronic components of our toco.