Content warning: My project deals with pediatric sexual abuse. Please take care of yourself while reading this blog.

Going into this internship, I was very excited to be able to work on an impactful project with amazing and talented people from a variety of backgrounds. This first week has truly made that a reality! As someone who has engaged in a variety of extracurriculars related to social justice and human-centered design, I’ve always really enjoyed opportunities where I’ve been able to work with groups with a clear broader purpose of helping make this world a better place. That’s the amazing thing about working on global health projects: we all share the common goal of improving health access and equity. Additionally, this internship and the Rice 360 Global Health Department as a whole have really emphasized from the beginning the benefits of a wide range of perspectives in designing truly sustainable and efficient solutions to these complex design challenges we wish to tackle. That’s why it is so exciting and welcoming for me, a Social Policy Analysis and Economics major to take the Global Health Technologies minor and work with many people from more technical engineering backgrounds in a collaborative setting, because we really learn a lot from each other.

When choosing a project, my main goals were to find one which aligned with my interests, where the social context was a key component of the design challenge, and which would have a large impact on the current status quo. All of the projects this year are exciting and important. I ended up choosing the pediatric pelvic model project, in which my team will work to develop a model for use in training nurses to conduct pelvic exams for pediatric sexual assault survivors. This is an important step of the process following the report or reasonable suspicion of pediatric sexual assault, and is a key component to making sure these survivors get the proper care they deserve. Our team is working with Ms. Nancy Harris, the TeleSAFE Director of Operations at United Concierge Medicine and director of forensic examiner nurse trainings in New York. She is very passionate and knowledgeable about this space and this project in particular. One thing that makes this project very exciting to me is the huge need for better training models and we will really be paving the way for something new. There are few professionals in this field and no currently available hands-on training models for training nurses, resulting in prolonged training periods. Although this is a very heavy project topic, our team has received overwhelming support from each other, our TAs, our internship leadership team, and our client. Everyone working with me has made it feel like a safe space to work on such an important yet emotional project, making it feel like a very supportive atmosphere. This sort of emotional awareness and support is truly crucial to working on a team project, especially with such a topic like this, and I very much appreciate everyone I’m working with.

This past week with the project we have been working on doing background research into the problem space, similar solutions, and potential materials. Additionally, we had a preliminary meeting with our client, who was very helpful in clarifying the need for and logistics of the project and is very supportive of our team. The internship programming included workshops to help us get familiar with the stages of the engineering design process and some prototyping tools. We built birdhouses in order to gain basic experience in hand tools. Our team, which consists of myself, a junior from Rice University, Shivani and Shannon, both sophomores from Rice University, and Alex, a sophomore from the University of Texas at Austin, has also done some bonding over the past week, including going to dinner together after work. It has been really great working with such passionate and interesting people from various backgrounds! I’m looking forward to diving deeper into design details and brainstorming how to make this design project come to life and be able to make a huge change!

Content warning: My project deals with pediatric sexual assault.

Hi everybody! My name is Alex Natelson and I am a rising sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, but I am super excited to be taking part in the SEED/Rice 360 internship this summer! This whole experience has been completely new to me as my background really isn’t on the bio side of things but I’m really enjoying it so far! I am a part of Team PIPER, which stands for Pediatric Instructional Pelvic Exam Resource, along with my teammates Elise, Shannon, and Shivani.

 

So far a lot of this process has been education-based with us spending a lot of our time doing background research on this topic since we aren’t all that familiar with it. We were able to speak with our client, Nancy Harris, and pick her brain on all of our concerns and questions surrounding this project. She really helped us out by giving us some resources to go off of and helping us to refine our research into one specific aspect of pediatric assault, the post-assault pelvic exam. This exam is what our project is intended to help make more clear in making a pelvic model for nurses to train on. All of the first week was spent doing workshops on problem evaluation and research, and then conducting that research.

 

This week, we have focused more on design criteria and brainstorming. We had a couple of workshops on designing for clients and usability, and my team has been working hard to identify what we need to include in our model. This has been a little more difficult for us, since we’re working almost from scratch, so we have to consider a lot of factors in our design. We have a good amount of design criteria right now, so we’re working on narrowing those down and combining criteria into full solutions. I’ve had an amazing time so far getting to know everyone in the internship, and I feel like everyone is really starting to bond now so I can only imagine how close we’ll be at the end of this. I’m super excited to continue my work with my team and I really hope we can make an effective solution!

Intro

When I arrived at the OEDK at 9am on Monday, the most exciting thing as I walked through the doors was seeing everyone’s faces. Since then, we have had in-person workshops with speakers and every day I’ve been able to sit at a table with my teammates, or lean over a circuit in the elec lab. This is the first Rice experience I’ve had unmasked and indoors, and so far it’s been incredible.

On Tuesday, everyone came into the classroom eager for their project assignments. The day before, I had sent in a ranked list of my choices, and fortunately, I got my top choice–– the portable field incubator. The goal is to develop a portable way to incubate water samples at body temperature in low resources settings to determine if water is safe to drink. There had been three previous iterations of this project, a senior design project, Minicubator; a freshman design project, Moonrats; and Public Invention, which is where our client works, had a project which was also called Moonrats. Our team is working on taking the best of the three prototypes and designing a device that works, is user friendly, and logs data.

After project assignments, my team had a chance to get to know each other and make the most important decision–– determining our team name. We had many ideas, ranging from ‘Clean Mean Incubation Machine’ to ‘Mars Beavers’, but eventually we decided on Petri-FI. Petri film is what must be incubated after a water sample is added to it, and FI stands for film incubator. For those of you who don’t know, the similarly-spelled Petrie is the name of a pterodactyl from the 80s children’s movie, The Land Before Time.

Naturally, he became our team mascot.

Speaking of the team, here we are on the steps of the OEDK!

Technical Stuff

We started out researching the basics and looking at previous team’s projects, including comparing the code from Minicubator and Public Invention and examining the freshman Moonrats team’s prototype. We also met with our client twice to find out what his expectations for the project were. Going forward, we plan to start with the code and electronics from team Minicubator but replace the insulated chamber they built, which was basically a 3D printed box full of insulation with a smaller 3D printed box inside it for the Petri films, with a standard wide-mouth thermos.

This week, we received the project description and began researching the project. We also reached out to the faculty advisors from the previous two teams: senior design team ‘Minicubator’ and freshman design team ‘Moonrats’. We went through the prototype that team Moonrats left us, and looked through the code, PCB design, and demo videos from team Minicubator. From what we can tell, their code is fairly robust and well-written. We compared it with the code on Public Invention’s Moonrats GitHub repository, and for the most part, the code does the same thing, but we have found a few significant differences, outlined below in Table 1. 

Table 1: Differences between PI Moonrats and Minicubator Arduino code. 

PI Moonrats	Minicubator
Hard-coded in places, sparsely commented	Well-commented and good use of variables
TMP36	Thermistor
EEPROM storage code	No EEPROM storage code
Graphing capability	Minimal graphing
Complex button decoding	Fewer menu options
Timer interrupt	No timer interrupt

 

We have decided to start working from the Minicubator code, mostly because it is clearly commented and does not have many hard-coded settings, unlike the Moonrats code. We also decided that the thermistor is better than the TMP36, and that the EEPROM storage code is unnecessary if we can find a way to utilize a micro-SD slot underneath the display screen. Eventually, we may also want to add a graphing feature of all the temperatures in the incubation period, like the one from Public Invention, but for now we will consider this low priority. In terms of the menu, we will probably try to program in more options, but ideally we will not make the button system as complicated as it is in the Moonrats code. We have not yet made a decision on the timer interrupt issue.

On Monday, we will get Minicubator’s prototype. Once we have this, we can test the functionality and get a better idea of what we should focus on improving. Specifically, there are some aspects of the PCB design on Fusion 360 that are confusing, and having the physical board will probably clear up those issues. We also have some tasks broken down by team member for the beginning of next week. My job is mostly to focus on hardware and wiring–– I need to cut the wires going from the nano into the heating element and solder six jumper headers onto each end, so that it is possible to unplug the device as the lid is removed once we transfer to a thermos-based system.

Future

I am really excited to work on more of the hands-on hardware issues, especially in terms of combining three prototypes into one. I think my biggest challenge will be to make a circuit I can keep adjusting, probably using a breadboard, from the outsourced PCB that Minicubator left us. I expect to spend a lot of time in the elec lab next week! As a side note, this week I also decided to switch my major–– previously it was electrical engineering, and now I’m planning to do mechanical engineering. I’m really glad that even though I’m moving away from hardware overall, I will still have plenty of opportunities to pursue my interests in electrical engineering throughout this project!

Hello all!

My name is Alvin Ibeabuchi and I am so exited to be a part of the Rice 360/SEED collaboration this summer. Here with Rice 360, I feel more than welcome. During the first week, I have had the pleasure to meet wonderful new people. I got to attend informative workshops amazing leads.  I also was given the opportunity to work on a project that can better my skill set as an engineer while potentially impacting someone’s life.

I am blessed to be on a great team with an enthusiastic and interesting client, Dr. Robert Read. My team will be working on the Bag Valve Mask (BVM) Indicator. This project entails many different skill sets that I would love to develop and learn such as CAD, coding, electronics, and UI/UX. I look forward to completing this project and enjoying this experience. This is going to be a great summer!

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!

My first week was exciting and  I am proud of the people I will be working with. This summer I will be developing a Bag Valve Mask monitor which gives feedback to the user to prevent both under ventilating and over ventilating a patient. My client is Dr. Robert Reed, the founder of the Public Invention. I look forward to this because I will improve my knowledge in coding, CAD and electronics.

Hi, my name is Rachel Lee. I’m a rising sophomore studying bioengineering and this summer I will be a SEED intern at the OEDK. 

I had taken ENGI 120, a freshman design course meant to give students an introduction to the engineering design process, and saw SEED as a chance for me to focus entirely on a project without the added burden of classes and extracurriculars. 

This first week, we were assigned our projects and quickly jumped into clarifying the problem context. Our team (Team Heartache), composed of my teammates Kaitlyn, Christopher, and Sam, is tasked with developing a device that will mimic lung-heart motion. Our clients are a team of engineers from the Electrophysiology Clinical Research & Innovations department at the Texas Heart Institute. Due to our close proximity to THI, we were able to meet our clients in person. Upon arriving, we were shown the current prototype and quickly realized that this project had pivoted sharply from the original direction the ENGI 120 team from last semester had taken. My excitement grew as I continued to talk to the engineers at THI. They were so knowledgeable and delighted to help. 

For the next coming weeks, I will go through the engineering design process once more, but I will have more time for the “fun” stages, like prototyping, testing, and iterating over and over. This week was over before I could blink, and I can already tell that these six weeks will fly by. 

Excited for what’s to come,

Rachel Lee

Hello everyone!

My name is Sara Barker, and I’m a rising senior at Rice University. I’m studying Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Global Health Technologies. This summer, I’m participating in Rice 360’s internship program, where I will be working on developing a device to assist in testing for E. coli in water sources in low resource settings. I’ll be taking this project on along with my teammates on Team Petri-FI. If you’re curious about the name, think Petri as in Petri dish, or in our case, Petrifilm, and FI as in Field Incubator (more on what those terms mean later). Unfortunately, I cannot take credit for such an inventive name. We’re super excited to get a start on this project!

As our team name suggests, our task is to develop a field incubator to incubate Petrifilms for 48 hours. What exactly is a field incubator? To explain an incubator, think about how chicken eggs are hatched.

An example of an egg incubator. Source: https://diyprojects.com/homemade-incubator/

They have to be kept warm while the chicks grow inside the egg. We want to do the exact same thing, but with colonies of bacteria. Researchers who are studying water quality have to go out into the field and collect samples for testing, but any bacteria in the water are too small to see without a high-powered microscope – not something you want to lug around rural Africa or South America. Our solution is to use Petrifilms.

Petrifilm. Source: http://cels.uri.edu/docslink/ww/BacteriaWorkshop/EColi3MPetrifilm.pdf

They act just like Petri dishes – you drop some water on the pink circle, and any bacteria in that water will form colonies that will grow to be large enough to be visible to the naked eye in about 48 hours. Here’s what E. coli colonies look like on a Petrifilm:

E. coli on a petrifilm. The blue dots are E. coli colonies. Source: http://cels.uri.edu/docslink/ww/BacteriaWorkshop/EColi3MPetrifilm.pdf

Our task is to develop a device that can keep these Petrifilms at around 35-37°C continuously for 48 hours. It needs to be portable, run on a single charge, and maintain the set temperature. We’ll also be looking at implementing some advanced “smart” features, such as displaying a graph of temperature fluctuations over time on an LED screen.

However, before we can start implementing all these features, we have to do some research. This past week was spent mostly doing just that. We’ve found out a lot about E. coli – did you know fish pond water won’t have E. coli because E. coli only lives in the digestive tracts of warm-blooded animals? We’ve also been examining some past prototypes of the same project. They have different physical designs, and their respective codes are somewhat different, so we’ll have to find the best features of each design and combine them into one product.

This week, we’re going to continue to examine previous prototypes, and we’ll also outline our design criteria in preparation for building our own device. Team Petri-FI is ready to dive into this project, and I hope this blog’s readers are as excited as we are to make some progress.

See you soon in the next blog,

Sara

Wow, it has been a week already! We have been very busy and hit the ground running in week one, meeting our teams, clients, international collaborators, and mentors. Entering this internship, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t at all nervous about being the only virtual intern. However, as I sit in my room in Lahore, Pakistan, I feel connected with not only everyone else in the program, but also with my own roots.

A little bit about myself: I am a rising junior at Baker College studying bioengineering. I have been involved with public health from early on — I was along my mother’s side when she was a frontline health worker during the Pakistani dengue fever epidemic. A year later, I was a volunteer two floors away. Coming to Rice as an international student, I knew I wanted to translate my experiences into something even more impactful. Over the course of my two years at Rice, I have met so many exceptional people who have empowered me to work in global health. I have been able to advocate for global health to Congress representatives, fundraise for pressing global health challenges, and raise awareness on-campus about important global health issues. Now, with this internship, I can go a step further and combine my love for design with my passion for global health.

This summer, I am a part of Team “Now UV Me, Now U Don’t” with Abby and Vanessa. Our team is working to create a sterilization device that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to decontaminate personal protective equipment (PPE) in low-resource clinical settings. We are primarily focusing on N95 masks, although we hope our device will be applicable to a range of protective gear. The pandemic that we find ourselves living through has shown us the great need for PPE. However, even outside of the COVID pandemic, the widespread prevalence of airborne diseases like tuberculosis in low-resource settings necessitates having a sustainable access to PPE.

This week, we met with our three mentors, who are among the leaders of their respective design studios in Houston, Tanzania, and Malawi. We were able to gain crucial insight into the clinical contexts we are designing for. Different versions of the Steribox device already exist in Tanzania, Malawi, and Houston. We hope to redesign and improve many aspects of the device that is based in Houston, as it is the most advanced and newest addition. We were pleased to learn that there is another group of interns based in Malawi who are working on redesigning the Malawian version of the device (which has some key functional differences). Some (broad) areas where we hope to improve the device are mechanical design, usability, and sustainability.

In the coming weeks, I will be blogging about the progress our team makes on the Steribox. I can’t wait to see how my team and I grow!

— F