Hi everyone! It is hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I am almost at the halfway point of the internship. The new experiences that I have gained by immersing myself in the design process have helped me develop a mindset of an engineer and strengthen my insights into what real global health collaboration looks like.
My team and I mainly focused on brainstorming and evaluations of possible solutions this week. Earlier in the internship, our client was able to connect us with some registered nurses and nursing students in Malawi in order to better understand our end-user population. We were able to gather their feedback through zoom meetings and Google surveys. As their responses came in, we started to revise our design criteria in order to better fit the needs of our users. Specifically, we moved appearance up on our chart since our users stressed the importance of the training model looking like an actual newborn. We also were able to get into contact with a few nurses working in the U.S. to get their perspectives on the New Ballard Score and their training on the assessment. A discrepancy that we found in these interactions is the relative importance of the Ballard Score in the United States and Malawi. While the Ballard Score is relatively well-known in Malawi, many of the clinicians in America that we contacted had little to no knowledge of the Ballard Score since we have ultrasound machines that can examine the gestational age of a baby. Discrepancies like these remind me not only of the privileges that come with living in a more developed country, but also how limited resources play a huge factor in the shaping of existing structures in other regions.
A huge highlight for the team was that our baby doll came in! Her name is Nikki Iggy Madonna Beyonce Shakira (NIMBS), and we hope that she can help empower nurses to help save newborn lives the way that the women she is named after have empowered so many people 🙂 It is going to be difficult to pick apart such a cute doll, but we are excited to start low-fidelity prototype during Week 4.
Besides the huge progress that my team and I have accomplished in designing our model, there were other huge highlights for me throughout the week. I was able to participate in multiple design workshops to develop certain engineering skills. We anticipate that 3-D printing will be an important component for our final model, so everyone on the team has been working hard on improving our Auto Fusion 360 skills in order to design parts. Working with such a novel software has been tricky to adapt to, but with each tutorial, I feel like I am able to understand more and more of the language of 3-D printing. I also was able learn how to solder a circuit as well!
As we progress into Week 4, we will begin low-fidelity prototyping the different mechanical joints that could possibly be used for each joint and decide on which one would work the best for our training model.
Team Photo
Talk to you soon!
Lam Nguyen