Hello! Throughout the next few weeks, I will be posting updates about my experiences working at the Oshman Design Engineering Kitchen (ODEK) at Rice University in Houston, TX as part of the Rice 360 Global Health Technologies Summer Internship. I am excited about diving deep into the engineering design process and begin developing a solution to a global health issue!

Before getting into the details of my first week, I would like to tell you about myself and the experiences that have led me to become a Rice 360 intern. My name is Lam Nguyen, and I was born and raised in Houston, and I’m a rising junior at Lovett College. I am also a pre-med student working towards a B.S. in Chemistry and a minor in Global Health Technologies. In terms of extracurriculars, I am a  tutor for Rice PAIR, a Houston Methodist Patient Service volunteer, an undergraduate researcher in the chemistry department, and a peer academic advisor.

My passion for global health stems from my past experiences volunteering for a Mexican non-profit that is dedicated to providing shelter and basic resources for low-income families who are seeking pediatric cancer treatment nearby. Interacting with these families and learning about the inequities that prevented them to access quality healthcare opened my eyes to how interwoven medicine and social justice are. Global health has provided me with an opportunity to explore these health-care related issues through a more interdisciplinary perspective. Furthermore, taking the GLHT 201 course here at Rice opened my eyes to how technology can be the answer to some of the most pressing global health issues. I see this internship as a great way to gain greater insight into the design process and what global health collaboration actually looks like.

This summer, I will be collaborating with fellow interns Andrew Sun and Gloria Ni in partnership with our wonderful client Mr. Prince Mtenthaonga, a nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Malawi. Our team name is NIMBS – Neonatal Instructional Model for Ballard Scoring. We will be closely working with Prince in order to build a training model that will aid nurses in learning how to properly perform the New Ballard Assessment in order to assess the gestational age of a newborn. For context, prematurity is one of the leading causes of newborn deaths, especially in under-developed regions, and it is estimated that about 80% of newborn deaths can be prevented by improving access to quality care at the time of birth. As a result, it is important to know a newborn’s gestational age in order to determine the necessary treatment. While ultrasound technology and a woman’s menstrual cycle are commonly used to determine gestational age, financial burdens and inconsistencies in record-keeping make these two options unreliable ways of determining gestational age. The New Ballard Score, a series of neuromuscular and physical examinations, provides a reliable alternative. Unfortunately, many nurses lack the necessary knowledge to perform the assessment, and the ongoing nursing shortage in Malawi makes it difficult to properly carry out the examinations. This creates a need for a training model that can help them practice implementing the Ballard Assessment. We hope to utilize a previous design team’s needs-finding research and the expertise of our client to satisfy this need.

This week, we worked on understanding the problem context, researching the Ballard Assessment, learning about newborn health, and familiarizing ourselves with how nurses are trained and the factors contributing to the nursing shortage. We met with a member of the previous design team that tackled this project in order to understand the challenges that they encountered, and we also met with Prince in order to clarify the problem and gain better insight into the parameters of our project.

We already have a rough idea of what our model is going to look like, and we will be working on developing robust design criteria during week 2.  We also are planning to contact nurses working in Malawi in order to gain a greater insight into the specific challenges they face working with newborns and utilizing the Ballard Assessment. Our team has already gotten to know each other very well, and I am looking forward to providing updates regarding the progress of our design and my overall growth throughout this summer! 🙂

-Lam Nguyen

 

Team photo

 

 

Hi all! My name is Michelle Gachelin, and I am a rising junior at Rice majoring in Health Sciences and minoring in Global Health Technologies and Environmental Studies. I am originally from Dallas, Texas, but I’ve lived all over the world, including France, South Africa and California, most recently.

I’m very excited to be interning for Rice 360 this summer — I have been hoping to join the internship since I took the Introduction to Global Health Technologies course with Dr. Taylor last fall. This summer, my team will be working on NESTation, a low-cost solution capable of storing, charging and sanitizing handheld medical devices in low-resource settings. Currently, no functional solutions to this problem seem to exist, so nurses and other healthcare professionals store these devices haphazardly without clear monitors for their charging status and other important signals. 

The first few days of the internship have revolved around getting to know each other, being assigned our projects and delving into the problem’s historical and current context. Since we’re the first internship team to tackle this problem, we expect to invest a significant amount of time learning about its background. I’ve been reminding myself that our goal isn’t to create a perfect final prototype that will satisfy every criteria, but instead to thoroughly conduct needs-finding assessments and interviews to understand the scope of the problem. We can then lay a strong foundation for future groups who may take on the project after us. Right now, we’re preparing for our first interview with Ms. Jackie Foss, one of our amazing mentors. We’re excited to learn more about the project and hopefully get in touch with some additional contacts.

Beyond developing our design criteria and the scope of our project, I’m looking forward to getting to know the other interns this summer. I’m glad that I’ve been able to spend more time with my team through Coffeehouse runs and yesterday’s professional development lunch (still thinking about the mango cheesecake), and I can’t wait for us to become closer.

Here’s to the start of a great summer!

Hello! My name is Ajay Kumar and I’m a Rice360 intern this year. I’m a rising senior from Will Rice College majoring in Biochemistry and Cell Biology with minors in Global Health Technologies and Statistics on the pre-med track. 

My first week in the internship has been amazing! While I was very excited to have the opportunity to participate in the program, I have to admit that I was also a little nervous. In fact, it wasn’t until the summer before my junior year that I realized I wanted to pursue a minor in Global Health Technologies. With essentially no experience in engineering design, I felt as though I may be a little out of my depths. But, through my experiences at Rice and in the minor, I became passionate about addressing global health design challenges so that high-quality healthcare can be accessible in low-resource countries and I knew this internship would give me invaluable experience in that space. 

We spent the first day of the internship doing orientation and learning more about the projects available this summer. It was hard figure out which project I wanted to spend my summer working on because they all seemed so cool and impactful. Each presented its own unique design challenge that I could imagine myself trying to tackle. After spending so much time trying to make up my mind, I was really happy to be assigned to the EPIWATER project. My teammates, Esther and Emily, are very smart and talented and I’m very excited to get to work with them over the next 7 weeks. 

The EPIWATER project is an automatic wastewater sampler developed by a senior design team last year that collects and stores samples from local wastewater infrastructure which can then be processed and tested in a lab in order to detect and surveil the prevalence of a disease on the community level; for the scope of this project, the samples would be tested for SARS-CoV-2 (this inspired our team name: COVID-Cooler). Our team’s goal is to refine the design so that a functioning prototype can be sent to Nigeria for deployment. This project was super appealing to me because of the opportunity to collaborate with international partners and implement our prototype for field testing in Nigeria. In addition it covers a diverse range of design challenges, from mechanical engineering and electronics to public health and microbiology, which presents a challenging opportunity for me to contribute my skills as a non-engineer while being able to learn new skills from my peers. 

Throughout the week, our team focused on learning more about the context of the problem we are trying to address. This involved exploring documentation from the past team, meeting with our mentors, Mr. Casserly and Dr. Achi, and doing research of our own. We even got to see the current prototype and figure out how it works. Our mentors have been an incredible resource to our team as they really helped us understand the scope of the problem we are trying to address. We learned that Nigeria currently has no system established to conduct wastewater epidemiology, which is a useful technique to enhance the testing capacity for the country. Samples must be collected periodically and aggregated over time and then stored in a temperature-controlled environment so the virus doesn’t degrade before it can be tested. Our clients shared that they would like a prototype that is portable and rugged so it can transported  between sampling sites, and that design changes must be made to protect the interior circuitry and improve the form factor and user interface of the prototype. In examining the prototype, we also discovered more challenges relating to the water collection process.

We plan to continue having discussions with mentors and experts involved with this project so that we can better define our design criteria and begin brainstorming solutions. I can’t wait for the next phases of the project and I’m so excited to see what our team accomplishes this summer