It’s hard to believe that there’s only one week of SEED left, with only three working days remaining. With the program’s closure, our team is also entering the final stretch. This week, we fabricated our final design for testing purposes, pictured below.

We decided to run many tests in order to assess the quality of our device against the design criteria that we had set out for it.

For our precision test, we assessed how consistent the device was by having each team member use it 7 times and calculating standard deviations. We also using the current device, a goniometer, and calculated standard deviations from its testing in order to compare with our device. After running the numbers, our device was under our goal of 5 degrees of standard deviation and also performed better than the goniometer. The image below on the left shows a test being run on the goniometer.

          

We also ran a torque test as a measure of ease of use. For the setup, we anchored the device at the forearm clamp and pivoted the wrist clamp, with a spring scale attached to the wrist clamp. The test was conducted by pulling on the wrist clamp via the spring scale and reading the force at which it moved, which was done using a slow motion video recording. The set up can be seen in the pictures above on the right. Our device met our goal of at most 0.35 Newton-meters, which is 5 percent of the average human wrist torque.

We also conducted some user testing in which we grabbed random participants from nearby and surveyed them. For our ease of setup test, we gave each user a set of instructions and timed how long it took them to put on the device. Our results met our goal of under 3 minutes for setup. We also conducted some comfort testing where we asked users to rank our device on a user defined scale. The average score of 4 confirmed our comfort testing.

Lastly, we conducted a durability test. The points of failure during our drop test were taken into account for our final iteration. The only test we were not able to conduct was a versatility test in order to see how many patients can our device be used for. Since we haven’t had a chance to visit the hospital yet, we were slightly limited on our resources but we hope to discuss the adaptability of the device with the doctor next week.