*Content warning: My project deals with pediatric sexual abuse. Please exercise self-care while reading.
Hello! Over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting updates and reflections about my experiences working in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) on campus in Houston as a Rice 360° summer intern. I am so excited and thankful for the opportunity for exposure to the engineering design process in a health-related project.
Before I jump into my blog, I’d like to tell you a bit about who I am and how I ended up as an intern this summer. My name is Shivani, I’m from Dallas (but my family is from Maharashtra, India), and I’m a rising sophomore at Lovett College here at Rice! I’m majoring in Neuroscience on the pre-med track, and planning to minor in Global Health Technologies. I’m involved on campus as a member of Rasikas (Rice’s South Asian classical dance team), a content writer in Catalyst (Rice’s undergraduate science research journal), the secretary of University Court, and as a peer academic advisor. In my free time, you can usually find me either hanging out around Lovett or getting an iced latte (with honey) at Rice Coffeehouse.
I became especially interested in pursuing a Global Health Technologies minor after taking GLHT 201: Introduction to Global Health during my first semester. Coming from a natural sciences and pre-medical background, how could I get direct experience with the intersection between health sciences and actual implementation of health technologies? This internship was the answer, and I’d like nothing more than to design and develop a real-world, impactful technology and collaborate with a group of people who share my commitment to health equity.
This summer, I’ll be collaborating with fellow interns Elise Erickson, Shannon McGill, and Alex Natelson (watch for their blogs too!) in partnership with our wonderful client Nancy Harris, the TeleSAFE Director of Operations at United Concierge Medicine and director of a forensic examiner nurse training program in New York. Our team name is PIPER – Pediatric Instructional Pelvic Examination Resource. We will be working to develop the first-ever hands-on pediatric pelvic model intended to help clinical providers learn how to and gain confidence in evaluating pediatric survivors of sexual assault. Currently, child sexual abuse affects roughly 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys at least once during childhood, and can have a series of consequences such as injuries, STIs, adverse mental health outcomes, and even a significantly higher risk of sexual victimization in adulthood (1). The fact that we currently lack a hands-on training model for conducting pediatric pelvic examinations makes our team’s project incredibly urgent and potentially highly impactful.
We hope to adapt or at least use insights from LUCIA, an adult cervical cancer screening instructional model developed previously by Rice 360°, while developing our model, which will have some key anatomical and functional differences due to the type of examination for which the model is intended. Although the topic and context of our project is quite heavy, I’m really glad that we have the opportunity to hopefully make an improvement to current training systems and ultimately minimize trauma to pediatric survivors during examinations.
This past week, we worked extensively on understanding the problem context, researching anatomy and its changes as children grow, learning how sexual assault examinations are conducted, and familiarizing ourselves with existing training resources. We also met with Ms. Harris to clarify what issues our model should address, underwent some tools and equipment training, and actually got the chance to observe and interact with the two most recent iterations of the LUCIA model for additional insights.
In the coming days, we’re looking to establish concrete and measurable design criteria for our model and start the brainstorming process! We already have several initial ideas but will be able to better organize them once we clarify our design objectives with our client. Our 4-person intern team has already grown quite close, and I’m looking forward to continuing our work and posting updates!
-Shivani
1. Preventing Child Sexual Abuse. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childsexualabuse/fastfact.html. Published April 30, 2021. Accessed June 15, 2021.