Hey y’all! My name is Alex David, and I am excited to be interning with Rice360 at the OEDK this summer! I am currently a rising junior from Will Rice majoring in BioSciences and Kinesiology with a minor in Global Health Technologies. I was first introduced to the field of Global Health through the introductory course taught by Dr. Ashley Taylor during my freshman year where I was familiarized with some of the health disparities faced by low resource communities. I was able to deepen my understanding of these issues on a global scale through the GLHT 360 design course as well as how they impact communities locally here in Houston through volunteering in the medical center. I am eager to continue to explore design challenges in global health this summer and work to improve access to equitable healthcare beyond this internship.

The week started off with a project fair where we were presented with several potential projects. While they all seemed intriguing the one that stood out to me was the challenge of designing a prosthetic hand to help a 6 year old boy play basketball. To tackle this, I partnered up with two of my colleagues JJ and Shreya. Throughout the week, they both provided unique perspectives to our discussions, and I really look forward to collaborating with them this summer.

We had the honor of meeting Eric Jr. and his mom towards the end of the week. In addition to casting a mold of his small hand, we learned that although he was a little shy at first, Eric is an energetic and active kid who actually has some impressive basketball skills! Prior to their visit to the OEDK, our team, which we named “Flick the Wrist,” conducted background research into the problem space as well as some of the existing solutions which gave us several potential ideas to build off of. We will also be working closely with E-Nable, which is a global community that shares open source designs and ideas to build low-cost 3D printed prosthetics. We are very excited to see what we can come up with over the next seven weeks and see if we can help Eric Jr. become the next basketball star!

 

Thanks for reading my post for this week! If you would like to follow my journey this summer, I will be providing weekly updates on my team’s project as well as on my personal experience with the internship.

-Alex