This week felt like the culmination of the past three weeks of work — we had prepared, we had researched, we had brainstormed, and finally, we were going to get advice from our stakeholders.
Prototyping and engineering design is something that I felt knowledgeable about, going into this internship. But one of the things that I love about bioengineering and global health is that these particular fields are an intersection of the advancement of these amazing technologies as well as the humanistic component. The design of the face shield and the UVC system, for instance, might be incredible from the perspective of an engineer, but may be wholly useless and uncomfortable for the user. Stakeholder interviews taught me just that — the importance of keeping the problem and the people in the front of your mind, always.
Over three days of stakeholder interviews, our team talked with 14 stakeholders and generated eight pages of useful feedback to help guide our project suggestions. Some of the stakeholders were engineers and designers, experienced in medical device design as well as the complexity of local supply chain management. Their expertise helped us more critically analyze the prototypes we have been given. Why is the UVC system orientation the way that it is? How can we determine a better orientation? Why use long UVC bulbs when we can use smaller strips of UVC lights? Why did the design studio make the face shields using the open-celled foam material? Should we start considering using PET film rather than 3D-printed plastic for the shield? Our team had suggested viable, useful innovations, but we hadn’t critically questioned the prototype we were given, and why it was designed the way that it was. While I didn’t expect the criticism that came from some stakeholders, every single person still provided useful information that our team needed.
Other stakeholders, like clinicians and hospital administration on-site in Malawi, were useful in ensuring that the prototypes we were improving would truly help the people we were trying to help. They gave us critical information on the number of masks that needed to be disinfected per day, as well as the softer materials that they really wanted on the face shields. We learned more about the power and space capacity some of the larger hospitals in Blantyre and Lilongwe have, and we also gained a deeper understanding of the lack of PPE that is available. Right now, in Kamuzu Central Hospital, a nurse told our team that the entire hospital is not provided with N95s — only those that work in intensive care units, or work directly with COVID-19 patients, are provided with the masks. The rest, on the other hand, wear surgical masks. The fact that the mask I wear at home is the same as medical professionals on the frontlines in Malawi is crazy. It saddened me, but it also reinforced the sentiment that the prototypes that the Rice 360 teams are working on will really make a difference. That’s something that is incredibly special.
After debriefing with my teammates, and sorting through the pages upon pages of feedback we had, I was tired, but more excited for the next two weeks. It’s the final stretch, and with all this information, I know my team is ready to dive back into these projects and further develop our final improvements for the design studio.
– Bhavya 🙂