Hello! My name is Abby Dowse, and I am a rising junior at Rice majoring in Bioengineering and minoring in Global Health Technologies. I am also a very proud member of Lovett College – the best residential college at Rice – and am originally from the state of Wisconsin.

So far, the internship has been off to an amazing start! Coming in, I was simultaneously very excited and also slightly nervous. I have wanted to participate in this internship ever since I first applied to Rice; in fact, I mentioned it in one of my admissions essays! I am extremely passionate about designing medical devices for low-resource countries, and I knew that the Rice 360 internship would give me the very unique opportunity to do just that. In past years, I have loved reading through blogs posted by interns, so I am thrilled to have the opportunity to share my experiences as well. On the other hand, the great work that has been done in previous summers intimidated me slightly, as I questioned whether I had strong enough technical skills to complete something on the same level. However, I think that this opportunity will give me a hands-on opportunity to develop skills in areas I am less confident in.

On the second day of the internship, we were assigned to our projects and found out the groups we would be working with over the summer. Along with three other talented interns, I was assigned to work on the Steribox project! Our team will be working on a mobile device which utilizes UV light to disinfect many N95 masks at one time, and which is being designed for use in low-resource settings. Our job is to improve upon the great work begun by a senior design team last year. 

Over the course of this week, my team’s main focus has been understanding the context of the problem and the need for the device, as well as defining what specific elements of the current prototype need to be modified or improved. In order to gain this information, it was extremely important for our team to talk to our three mentors, who are located in Houston, Malawi, and Tanzania, respectively. Since we are not able to directly visit the sites where the sanitation devices will be used, our international mentors are invaluable.

During our interviews with our clients, we discovered that in many low-resource countries, mask shortages are a major problem. Although these shortages were exacerbated by COVID-19, they were an issue even before the pandemic. In some hospitals, entire infectious disease wards were only given 3 N95 masks per month; therefore, finding a way to safely and effectively disinfect masks so that they can be reused is vital for patient and clinician safety. Previously, masks had been disinfected with chemicals (such as ethanol and chlorine), but these methods only allowed for a single reuse of each mask due to the damaging effects of the chemicals. In addition, researchers at Rice had developed a very effective UV sanitation room, but many smaller, low-resource clinics are unable to give up an entire room. Our device hopes to address these problems.

In addition, our clients provided us with the most important elements of the design to focus on over the next six weeks. These elements include:

1. Mobility – need to be able to move around a hospital
2. Safety – need failsafe to prevent operator exposure to UV light
3. Time – need to decrease run time (maximize number of masks per unit time)
4. Power – due to unreliable power in clinics, device should be off-the-grid
5. Sustainability – use materials that are widely available locally or easy to import
6. Usability – should be able to be operated by one person with minimal training
7. Successfully sterilizes masks – must provide enough light to successfully sanitize all sides of all masks

This week, our team is starting the brainstorming process, in which we will better define design criteria, begin coming up with potential solutions to meet those criteria, and then narrow those solutions down. Our group has already begun coming up with a few preliminary ideas for improving upon the previous team’s device, and I am looking forward to exploring them more. I am very excited to have such a wonderful team and project to work on over the course of this internship, and I cannot wait to see what we accomplish!