It’s our last week here at the OEDK, as SEED is finally coming to an end. Team Toco spent most of this week doing some last testing on our fiber optic before we hand off the project to Dr. Carns. Our main goal for testing this week was determining the minimum displacement of fiber optic cable that we can reliably detect with our device. Since we know that movements on the belly during contractions are very small, it’s important we know just how sensitive our device can potentially be for any future iterations on the Optoco. For our testing, we’ve been using a translation stage provided by Dr. Carns, which is capable of moving our boxes apart very precisely. We spent Monday creating a setup for the device, screwing the translation stage into a piece of plywood and working out how to attach our 3D printed boxes to the stage. Once we had everything set up, we started testing pretty much the same way we had before we got the translation stage — we slowly moved the boxes apart until we could see the light level start to drop off. We discovered that under ideal conditions, we’re able to detect displacements as small as 0.25 mm consistently.

After finishing up testing, we worked the rest of the week on our final presentation, which we gave Wednesday afternoon. Since then, we’ve been working on winding down the project: doing cleanup and finishing documentation. The Optoco still has a ways to go before it’s finished, and we have some ideas for what could be done next, but unfortunately we’re out of time at the OEDK.

I just want to close up by saying that it’s been an incredibly fun summer working with everyone here at SEED. I’m going to miss everybody here, especially the international students as they head back home. Even though the Optoco didn’t quite get finished in the end, it’s been an amazing summer at the OEDK.

TEAM TOCO!