Two weeks of elaborate team discussions, interviews, and a bazillion sketches later, we have finally concluded the first round of brainstorming for our station. This week, we got to meet with Ms. Betsy Asma to further discuss the clinical needs of our devices. As we thought about our design, there were debates on the portability of the station. While it is more convenient for the station to be portable, we would risk the trade off of things going missing. After deliberate discussions, we came to a compromise with certain parts of the station being mobile, such as the potential for an additional cart. We also had an interview with Dr. Phillip Kortum regarding usability and human factors, which are extremely important to consider in our design. He really honed in on the need for simplicity and universality that can overcome even language barriers. In our interview with Vanessa Garlepp, a past intern with experiences in multiple past projects that had elements relevant to our design, we learned more about the circuitry of the safety feature for UVC usage, and also uninterrupted power supply as a candidate for our backup battery system. We also finally have the opportunity to meet with Prince, our clinical mentor, who gave us a solidified understanding of how our device will be used by the nurses, the current system in place, and other expected functions. And we finally got a picture with Jackie, our mentor!

                                                                 

After gathering all data from our literature research and interviews, along with the sketches, we were able to perform scoring matrices on our ideas. Our team had a lot of discussion on reframing our design criteria to better distinguish between our ideas and their efficiencies. Out of twelve full solutions, we chose to move forward with four ideas: the bucket building, the UFO, the ladder, and the cylindrical tower. They all take on different forms, so it would be very interesting to further explore the possibilities in the 3D space. 

                     

And now, for the most exciting part to come…seeing our ideas come to life with prototyping!! To be continued in next week’s blog 🙂

Thank you all again for tagging along with me on this wonderful journey this summer. Keep on doing the great things you’re doing and see you all next week!

Hi everyone! Week 4 of this internship has been the most packed so far. My team and I have accomplished so much on the road to our final design, and I am excited to share our progress with you all!

After weeks of interviews, planning, and brainstorming, we officially started our low-fidelity prototyping on the various joints. The first joint that we focused on was the knee. The knee is important in two Ballard examinations where the leg is extended until resistance is felt in the knee. This means that the mechanism that we implement in the knee needs to have a modular component to control its resistance. What I found fascinating about the low-fidelity prototyping process is how your expectations can contradict reality. There were so many ideas that I felt worked in my head, but they failed when I had to construct them. We low-fidelity prototyped several ideas, but the one we agreed on as the best one was a string mechanism. Specifically, the mechanism consists of a string threaded through the knee joint. One end of the thread would end with a knot while the other would be wound around a spinning dial. The spinning dial would allow users to adjust the resistance in the knee. The knee would then be screwed into a ball-joint linkage which will represent the hip.

                                                                                                  Hip and Knee Model

Another joint that we focused on was the shoulder. One of the examinations on the Ballard Score requires you to move your arm across the body. Since the shoulder is a pretty complicated joint, we were initially unsure about how we should model it to get the necessary motions. We decided to simulate the shoulder by using a wheel mechanism with a hinge joint on top of it.

                                                                                                       Shoulder Model

Besides the huge leaps that we have made with our project, week 4 has also offered me some great highlights outside of the project. My team decided that it would be great to spend some time with each other outside of the OEDK, so we decided to go to Torchy’s Tacos and get some boba as well! Since most of our conversations during work pertain to our project, it has been pretty difficult to get to know each other very well. It was great just to have the time to talk about things that didn’t have to do with engineering.

                                                                                                         Team Dinner

This week has been one of the most fulfilling weeks of the internship so far! To be honest, it was difficult to really see how this project could be done during the planning stages, but now that we are in the process of bringing our ideas to reality, it has been really great to see how our hard work is paying off!

Talk to you soon!

Lam Nguyen

 

This week was our busiest yet – with five interviews, brainstorming, and scoring our designs, we had plenty to work on. Speaking with Prince, our clinical mentor at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Malawi, was extremely helpful in solidifying our design decisions. After he expanded on how he envisioned our device, we were able to begin exploring physical prototypes through brainstorming. 

Here is our column of partially developed designs. These can be combined in one device or act as a standalone feature in the device, but the main objective was to visualize them together and draw them out before we could forget the idea. I enjoy this kind of conceptualization because I’m a visual person.

Above is our cluster of fully developed design sketches, grouped by common features. This process pushed us to explain our ideas clearly and completely think through each design. 

Now that we’ve screened and scored each device, we’re left with a few top contenders to move into low-fidelity prototyping. I’m looking forward to getting to work with the OEDK’s low-fidelity cart materials, and potentially even some hand tools. It will be cool to see our designs come to life, as ambitious as our ideas might seem on paper (or Post-It). 

Aside from prototyping, we have one more meeting lined up for next week to discuss user-interface design. We’ve already had some interesting ideas regarding an LED light display to indicate charging and sanitizing progress, among others, so it will be nice to hear feedback on those. 

Thanks for following along so far, and keep an eye out for more prototype updates next week!

Hello! Week three of this internship just ended, meaning we are already nearing the halfway point! It feels easy to dismiss the progress we have made, as these early weeks have been extremely background research and problem space oriented, but this foundation is pivotal to the success of our project. This week flew by as we had Monday off for Juneteenth. Thus far, it has been very exciting as our first week actually prototyping with our own design modifications as opposed to the exact kinetic hand model from e-NABLE. It was the first week, I made some progress on my personal goal of learning 3D modeling and CAD in fusion360.

This week we have made an extra effort into making sure that we are documenting our work every step of the way. Not only did a lot of this week revolve around finishing our design context review to ensure we had a comprehensive list on our resources and fleshed out version of our design criteria. Also, in order to be able to effectively use the little slots of time around workshops, we began making agendas. We created a general task list once at the beginning of the week, and then at the beginning of each day with more specific broken down tasks. Then at the end of the day, we went through and recorded what we actually had done. This would allow us to look back at what we had, both to have the sense of progress, for our daily standups, tech memos, and this blog!

As for prototyping, we have started to make some major progress. After some discussion, we decided that the first flaw with the original model we wanted to tackle was the thumb placement. In the original model, the thumb was placed somewhat forward, and the pad of the thumb was facing the palm of the hand to allow the hand to grab things when the fingers contracted. However, as there is no need to hold small things in basketball, the thumb in this position would prevent dribbling and need to extend outwards so the hand was in a more open palm position. Rather than creating a new model from scratch or heavily altering existing versions, we found that with two simple changes, we could mostly move the thumb into the correct position. We shaved off a part of the original palm, and angled the base of the thumb.

Finally, this week we also started testing different silicon materials to put in place for the silicon finger tips. After testing out various silicons that the OEDK already had, we tested out 2 different types and found that one of them seemed perfect for us based on a qualitative evaluation. This brings us to our plan for next week, in which we hope to do some testing to get some quantitative results to validate the changes that we have made.

Hey everyone!

Last week, our primary objectives were to become familiar with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software, begin to make modifications to the existing kinetic hand design from e-Nable, and continue researching and testing possible materials. At the beginning of the week, we participated in an introductory CAD workshop and then further familiarized ourselves with Fusion 360 and Blender using online tutorials. Finally, after all of our research and brainstorming, we began the process of making our first modifications to our base design.

The adjustments we’d like to make first are repositioning the thumb better so that there is equal contact between a basketball and each of the fingertips, improving the support provided by the wrist hinges during extension, and relocating the tensioners to maintain tension in the fingers while limiting the movement of the fingers. Since we were all fairly new to CAD, the process was slow at first, but we were able to later get the hang of it and complete the redesign of the thumb joint. (It’s sort of difficult to see in the image, but the thumb has been rotated inwards and further back on the hand.)

Later in the week, we had a very productive impromptu meeting with Dr. Grant Belton, who is one of the mentors for the smart helmet team. We were discussing various material options we were considering using while 3D printing our device, and he informed us that we could fabricate custom printed padded inserts using a lattice pattern infill and a special resin printer. This technology is already used to make helmets for NFL players and could match our intended use case very well.

Finally, as part of a low-fidelity prototyping workshop, I participated in an egg-drop contest with another team of interns. Using a design inspired by engineering influencer Mark Rober, we successfully passed the drop and won gift cards to Rice Coffeehouse!

Egg drop video!

Thanks for reading my post! See y’all next week!

Alex

Hi everyone! It is hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I am almost at the halfway point of the internship. The new experiences that I have gained by immersing myself in the design process have helped me develop a mindset of an engineer and strengthen my insights into what real global health collaboration looks like.

My team and I mainly focused on brainstorming and evaluations of possible solutions this week. Earlier in the internship, our client was able to connect us with some registered nurses and nursing students in Malawi in order to better understand our end-user population. We were able to gather their feedback through zoom meetings and Google surveys. As their responses came in, we started to revise our design criteria in order to better fit the needs of our users. Specifically, we moved appearance up on our chart since our users stressed the importance of the training model looking like an actual newborn. We also were able to get into contact with a few nurses working in the U.S. to get their perspectives on the New Ballard Score and their training on the assessment. A discrepancy that we found in these interactions is the relative importance of the Ballard Score in the United States and Malawi. While the Ballard Score is relatively well-known in Malawi, many of the clinicians in America that we contacted had little to no knowledge of the Ballard Score since we have ultrasound machines that can examine the gestational age of a baby. Discrepancies like these remind me not only of the privileges that come with living in a more developed country, but also how limited resources play a huge factor in the shaping of existing structures in other regions.

A huge highlight for the team was that our baby doll came in! Her name is Nikki Iggy Madonna Beyonce Shakira (NIMBS), and we hope that she can help empower nurses to help save newborn lives the way that the women she is named after have empowered so many people 🙂 It is going to be difficult to pick apart such a cute doll, but we are excited to start low-fidelity prototype during Week 4.

Besides the huge progress that my team and I have accomplished in designing our model, there were other huge highlights for me throughout the week. I was able to participate in multiple design workshops to develop certain engineering skills. We anticipate that 3-D printing will be an important component for our final model, so everyone on the team has been working hard on improving our Auto Fusion 360 skills in order to design parts. Working with such a novel software has been tricky to adapt to, but with each tutorial, I feel like I am able to understand more and more of the language of 3-D printing. I also was able learn how to solder a circuit as well!

 

As we progress into Week 4, we will begin low-fidelity prototyping the different mechanical joints that could possibly be used for each joint and decide on which one would work the best for our training model.

 

Team Photo

Talk to you soon!

Lam Nguyen

 

Week three kicked in, marking the almost halfway journey of the internship. Throughout the third week, our team continued interviews, our research on potential solutions and more brainstorming! As the process of brainstorming continues, I kept in mind a quote from the brainstorming workshop, “ Don’t aim for perfection, aim for excellence!” Even though I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist, sometimes I do find it difficult to not want things to be perfect. However, with the brainstorming process, personally, I have learned to put down even the craziest, most “imperfect” ideas. I also learned that creativity and innovation can appear at the most random time, as ideas don’t just come within one sitting. It was interesting for me to notice how I started becoming more conscious of my surroundings, trying to make connections to my project.  

This week we also got the opportunity to attend a low-fidelity prototyping workshop. In lo-fi prototyping, as they call it, the same principles can be applied. As our practice was on an egg drop, I think it is fitting to say we aimed for eggcellence, not perfection this time around. Just in 10 minutes, we finished our prototype, focused on the function, not perfecting minute details about how it looks. And that’s the beauty of lo-fi prototyping, the rapidness, the imperfections, building a tangible concept to see if an idea, previously on paper, would actually make sense in the 3D world. Upon hearing the assignment of building a mechanism that would protect an egg in a drop, I immediately thought of building a parachute, but my team was quick to build a protective layer of balloons. I wanted to reinforce our design by adding the parachute, but in the end, the results showed that the addition would have been unnecessary. Our egg was protected and we won a Rice Coffeehouse gift card! Upon reflection, I learned that simplicity is very important, especially in engineering design. A more simple design would be more intuitive and easier to use, and while looks are important, functions should be nailed down first and foremost. 

                                     

I will continue to apply the lessons I took from the workshop to our team project. Lo-fi prototyping is very fun and I highly suggest you all to use it to take your ideas to life, even for personal projects! 

 

As always, thank you for following my journey this summer. I hope to see all of you again next week! Continue to achieve eggcellence! (I will stop with the egg pun now 🙂

Hi everyone! We were able to make a lot of progress in our background research and informational interviews this week, which will be very helpful moving forward into brainstorming and prototyping. With the information from our interviews, we revised our initial list of design criteria and began thinking about how to set measurable goals for our prototype at the showcase. In line with our own motivations and with the request of our clients, we are ultimately aiming to create a conceptual prototype that will supplement the research deliverables we are developing. This will focus largely on form, and could potentially involve multiple prototypes. I’m glad that we have some additional clarity on what our final project will look like, since at first we were unsure whether we wanted to focus more on the research aspect of the problem. 

Along with refining our design criteria, we also completed our spreadsheet for NEST Bundle device specs, which organizes all the project-relevant information for each device in the bundle. We also created our benchmarking spreadsheet per Abby’s example (thank you Abby!) and organized each device into Charging, Sanitizing and Storing categories. Most excitingly, we continued brainstorming and sketching initial ideas and discussing design alternatives. Although we’re still in the very early stages of picturing what our device might look like, it’s been interesting to discuss certain features with the team. Examples of proposed components include removable or interchangeable cords, multiple USB ports per compartment, dividers or adjustable sections within the device, and a glass cover that will protect users from UVC light but also allow them visibility into the container. More to come on these features! 

Next week, we’ll have meetings with various Rice and Rice360-affiliated professionals, which is exciting. We will also be meeting Prince, a nurse in Malawi who advises many Rice360 and NEST360 projects. His clinical experience is extremely valuable, and I’m looking forward to applying it to our design sketches to create a more intuitive and useful device.

As another update, the low-fidelity prototype workshop from this week was as fun as I had hoped – we got to create prototypes in teams for a mechanism that would keep an egg from cracking after being dropped. Teams that were able to protect the egg won a Coffeehouse gift card – unfortunately my team’s egg cracked, but we’ll get ‘em next time.

That’s all for now! Until next time.