Hi! My name is Teja Paturu and I’m a rising senior at Rice University and this summer I am so excited to be working at the OEDK through the Rice 360 summer internship over the next few weeks. I am a Biosciences major with a concentration in Cell Biology & Genetics and have a minor in Global Health Technologies. Throughout my years at Rice, I have crystallized my passion to the intersection of engineering design and medicine to serve those who are underrepresented and under-resourced. As such, alongside this internship, I am applying to medical school so that I can bring the engineering design process to a long-time life goal of mine to be a physician. 

This summer I am working on a field incubator so that field engineers can test sources of water for safety. Water-borne illness kills 829,000 people each year– all preventable deaths with access to clean water. Diarrheal disease, typhoid, bacterial dysentery, and cholera are just some of all of the burden of disease sourced from access to clean water. WHO even estimates that these numbers are conservative claiming that only 5-10% of annual cases are reported officially. To reduce and better quantify the burden epidemiological surveillance, laboratory resources, and testing infrastructure must be accessible to low-resource area where the burden is the highest. 

However, in many areas without access to water, there is also in-access to laboratory testing, particularly water incubation tests to identify e. coli contamination which is a hallmark of other pathogen contamination. Therefore, my team, Nancy, Kenton, Sara, and I are working on a field incubator to increase access to this testing. We are not, however, starting from scratch: we are starting from 3 prototypes each with benefits and drawbacks. Our goal for the summer is to splice together the best of the prototypes and also add some features to make the device suitable for the widest range of use. As such, this past week we have worked on drafting some design criteria, or goals, for our device over the next 6 weeks: 

Criteria	Description
Safety	The device should have no risk of shorts, no exposed metal of wires. No risk of dangerous electrocution from water.
Battery-Powered	The device should be independent of a power grid.
Portability	The device should weigh ≤ 5 lbs and should be ≤ 0.5 ft3 in volume. The longest dimension should be no longer than 18in.
Temperature	The device should hold up to 37 degrees Celsius for 48 hours, in environments > 4 degrees Celsius.
Informative	Records data at intervals. The display shows the current temperature and also a temperature log for previous and current cycles. Should be able to record data for > 48 hours
Intuitive UX	Users are able to accomplish the following tasks easily– a subject can perform the following functions in < 3 minutes each Start incubation period Adjust temperature and duration View history of temperature by different intervals (several hours to full incubation cycle)
Housing Integrity	The device should be durable–– if it is dropped 50 times from a typical trunk height it should still be operational.
Aesthetically Pleasing	There should be no messy wires, and the device should have an aesthetically pleasing exterior.

To conclude, the first several days of the internship have been so exciting! My personal favorite part of these days has been meeting all of the interns and learning about their diverse backgrounds, so I encourage you to check out www.rice360.rice.edu/intern-blogs and read through the interns’ first posts as well– you will find a great plethora of very talented, interesting, and accomplished individuals!