Just finished week two of SEED, and we’ve officially started working on our main projects for the summer! We spent the first half of the week finishing up engineering bootcamp and our anteater enrichment devices. My team (Team Ants Ants Revolution!) came up with a series of PVC pipes tied together similar to a rope ladder, that hangs on the fence of the anteater exhibit. The pipes have attachments that stick out through the fence that the zookeepers can pour food through, and there are small holes drilled in the PVC so the anteaters can get at the food with their tongues. Below is a picture of the device hanging on a fence in the OEDK basement:
After we finished prototyping our anteater devices, we all presented them — it looks like we might go back to the zoo to test our devices at the anteater exhibit soon, which will be really cool. It’s been pretty great working on the anteater projects the last few days, and it was really nice to get a refresher on the whole engineering design process with a real project before we jumped into our main projects for the summer.
On Thursday, we went through a 3D printing workshop, and then got assigned to our major projects. I am part of Team Toco, working to create a low cost tocodynamometer to measure uterine contractions during labor. Uterine rupture is one of the leading causes of maternal death in Malawi — and is usually fatal for both the infant and the mother. It can generally be prevented if it is monitored and detected quickly; however, traditional devices used in the US — tocodynamometers — are extremely expensive, as well as uncomfortable for the patients. In low resource settings, contractions are monitored by manual palpation of the mother’s abdomen during labor, but this is very time consuming and often impractical. Our client, Dr. Jennifer Carns, would like us to create a lower cost, more comfortable device that measures uterine contractions optically. She brought us a proof-of-concept device demonstrating how contractions could be measured using an LED and fiber optic cable (pictured below).
The proof of concept consists of a fiber optic cable, cut in half inside of a metal hypotube, and the two ends of the cable attached to an elastic material. When the two halves are together, an LED shines through one end of the cable, and the light shines clearly out the other end. However, when the elastic is stretched, the two halves of the cable pull apart, and the amount of light that makes it through is reduced as the two cables separate. By attaching the device to a patient’s stomach, the strength of contractions could be measured by how much light is transmitted through the cable. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be working with Dr. Carns to refine the proof of concept, and begin work on sensors to measure and analyze the light coming through the device.