How’s everyone doing? Week 6 just finished and we’re making the final touches on our prosthetic hand! As we make our way to the last few weeks of the internship, we began finalizing some of our edits and modifications for our model. This week we finished redesigning the gauntlet and sizing it appropriately to Eric Jr.’s arm, removing excess bulk and extending the gauntlet further down his arm to help secure the device. After many failed attempts, we also redesigned the wrist hinges to add cushioning between the palm and gauntlet to reduce wrist movement and a potential wrist injury. Also, we were able to sew our compression sleeve to size Eric Jr.’s arm, to help make our prosthetic hand more comfortable for him to wear over the compression sleeve.
Despite all of our accomplishments this week, we experienced two big challenges. While attempting to print our flexible wrist hinges, the 3D printer did not print our piece properly and we would always get a failed print. We struggled figuring out why our piece would fail all the time, unsure if the printer was faulty or our STL file had an error. After many, many, many trials we finally were able to figure out the problem we were experiencing: the printer wasn’t giving the hinge enough time for the filament to settle and therefore would always droop. We finally were able to get successful prints once we noticed this and printed out our modified wrist hinges.
We also experienced a huge challenge when Eric Jr. came in and after performing user testing on him realized that the prosthetic hand pinched his skin between the bottom of the palm and the top of the gauntlet. This meant that our idea to attach the strings to the bottom of the hand to keep the fingers tensioned was a failure, as this modification would pinch his hand even more :/ After doing some analysis with our team, we decided it was best to simply remove the finger tensioners all together, and modify the bottom of the palm to reduce the pinching. This was a huge failure as our team invested a lot of time coming up and applying this modification, to see that this would cause more harm than benefit to Eric Jr.
As we get ready to begin the last week of the internship, we can finally start seeing our parts come together for our final model. We are really excited next week to do the finishing touches on our prosthetic hand and begin our higher fidelity model using the nylon 3D printed. Next week we will to increase the quality and durability of our final model and polish up our pitch presentation and poster for showcase. We are really excited to finish our model and hand Eric Jr. all our summer’s worth of work, hoping he will use it in his future to help him expand his basketball skill set!