Hi everyone, it’s Diya again, with another week of blogging!

Starting of with work updates: 

• Team PuMPED: This week we wrapped up brainstorming, morphing, screening, and scoring. We also thought through the details of our top solutions and made detailed sketches. Then, Mina started working on CADing the form factor. Parnika and I worked on trying out a different pump – a diaphragm pump instead of peristaltic and figuring out how to change the motor speed with a potentiometer. We also worked on getting the pressure sensor to work with the help of Mr. Joe Bailey, an electronics engineer at Rice360. Hopefully by next week’s prototyping session, we will be able to integrate a motor of our choice and even some components of the pressure sensing system along with an almost complete form factor! 
• Breast Cancer Project: We ordered and tried out a lot of materials this week and showed them to the clinical mentors and MD Anderson. They gave us more insight into how our models were still too hard and how to model some of the lesions. Phillip has been working on using Rhino to make a 3D mold for the breast. Meanwhile, I’ve been researching and ordering materials that we’ve tried out. So far, the most successful materials for the general fatty tissue of the breast has been Ecoflex Gel (the one with the lowest shore hardness) and a silicone rubber we found from a company called BrickInTheYard. However, I still think these are a little harder than fatty breast tissue which almost feels like it’s filled with fluid. I have some more ideas for materials that I will order over the weekend. This is probably the most challenging part of creating our model so progress on this part has been a little slow but hopefully we can get more success soon! On a positive note, we have tried many of our ideas for creating the lesions such as masses, thickening, and fibroadenomas and modeling these has actually been much more successful! The MD Anderson clinicians especially really liked how the thickening felt! We’ll be continuing this process of trying out materials next week! 

On a personal front, I’ve gotten some great insight from all the workshops this week about what type of classes I want to take next year. Although this is not finalized, I’m thinking that I still want to major in Bioengineering but I want to take a couple of classes that will help me learn arduino and electronics as I’m getting really interested in this skill in Engineering Design. I’m also going to start (this weekend) going through free Arduino and CAD tutorials so that I can self learn these skills as much as possible in the remaining 6 weeks of summer. I’m also going to take the learnings from our Resume Workshop to improve my resume and Linkedin/Handshake/12twenty profiles. 

Additionally, this week I got a lot of chances to interact with and bond with the international interns and SEED interns. All of us eat lunch together almost every day and discuss things outside of work. We’ve started talking about an internship party, playing basketball/soccer together, and other things that all sound super fun! Furthermore on Friday, all of us went to an Escape Room. This was a super fun experience even though we were unable to escape. I thought we worked pretty well as a team and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. We also went to Chipotle for dinner after which was tasty and another fun bonding experience. I’m really looking forward to all the future chances to interact with all the interns! 

There’s so much to learn and so much exciting prototyping to do next week!
– Diya