Hello! My name is Diya Gupta and I am a rising sophomore majoring in Bioengineering and minoring in Data Science! I’m also from Brown College. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting updates, experiences, and reflections while working as a summer Rice360 intern! I’m super excited and grateful for the opportunity to work on global health related engineering design projects with an amazing team of people! 

Before diving into my blog, I’d like to tell you a little more about myself. I’m from Seattle, Washington, and my family is originally from Maharashtra, India. Apart from classes, I’m a dancer on Rice Rasikas (classical Indian dance team), and very involved with Rice’s South Asian Society. I’m also a Peer Academic Advisor and a part of clubs like Biokind Analytics and Rice Medical Design. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, grown, and learned through my freshman year at Rice, and I can’t wait for what this summer and future years hold!

After much anticipation and excitement for the past month since school ended, this was finally the first week of our internship! The internship proceeded with an amazing start as I got to know an amazing team of intern colleagues and mentors, participated in several meaningful workshops and discussions, and got introduced to my projects for the summer. On our first day, Dr. Ashley Taylor initiated discussion on what each of our goals and values were. In reflection this was such a meaningful conversation that allowed me to verbalize what I valued most and made me feel more grounded and accountable towards my motivations and reasons for being an intern at Rice360. Even as I got my projects through the rest of the week, I kept in mind the values and goals I discussed to frame my approach to the tasks for the week. There were also several other important workshops during the week on situational awareness and protocols in other countries, ethics in global health, cultural humility and understanding, and historical perspectives. Dr. Taylor, along with other mentors, shared some of their personal stories and experiences with these subjects when they were working outside the US which really helped me unpack and ponder what global health, and this internship, meant to both me and other people in different settings. 

On the second day of the internship, we were introduced to our projects! Along with my teammate, Phillip DuBose (go check his blog too!), I’ll be working with clinicians at MD Anderson to build a breast cancer screening and/or diagnosis training model. Previously, MD Anderson, the WHO, and Rice 360 have worked extensively to expand access to cervical cancer screening through the LUCIA training model. However, access to breast cancer screening and diagnosis in low-income countries such as Mozambique remains extremely limited, leading to numerous preventable instances of undiagnosed and later stage breast cancer. Thus, access to screening and diagnosis is a top priority for our clinical mentors at MD Anderson. Furthermore, as per our research this week, we found that the WHO has also just very recently launched a Global Breast Cancer initiative this year. There is a clear need and push for expanding access to breast cancer screening and diagnosis Phillip and I are very excited to work on this summer. However as we learned about this tremendous need and impactful project idea, we also had many, many questions for many different people. We met with Dr. Meaghan Bond at Rice360 to discuss the work of Team Breast Test, who had worked on a similar project in 2018 and with Dr. Taylor to clarify the project scope and the purpose, target, and goals of the model. From these meetings, we collected that there were two main ways we could go about this:

1. Model 1: Provides training for breast cancer screening through clinical breast examination. The benign and malignant breasts should look and feel right for appropriate training. This model should also account for benign lesions/tumors. 
2. Model 2: Provides training for breast cancer diagnosis through ultrasound guided core needle biopsy. The lesions and tissue in this model need to look right inside on the ultrasound. This model should account for the gradual removal/deterioration of the model through practicing the core needle biopsy on it. 

However, we have crucial questions about both these models that we need to discuss with the clinicians at MD Anderson before proceeding with either model. Thus, in the next week we will be focusing on meeting several mentors such as the clinicians, Rice360 fellows who worked on the LUCIA model, and other colleagues at Rice360 in order to better define and address the needs of our target population. Furthermore, we will work on flushing out our Design Context Review and starting work on making Design Criteria for the engineering project.

Excited for another week and diving deeper into our project!

Until next week,

Diya 

 

During the last week of the internship, we had the opportunity to present our project pitch and prototypes at the 2022 Rice360 Internship Innovation Showcase, held in the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC). We decided to have our medium-fidelity prototypes for the Bucket Building and the Unidentified Fixed Object (UFO) finalized by the end of Week 6, so that we could focus on the Fusion360 animations and perfecting our project pitch during Week 7.

Frontloading the prototypes as much as possible definitely served us well, because we discovered an error over the weekend with the circuitry in our prototype of the UVC door. We created this larger-than-life compartment to demonstrate how the UVC would turn off as soon as the compartment was opened. This helps ensure the user’s safety, since they won’t be exposed to UVC light, while also ensuring power efficiency. Although the team was able to correctly install the circuitry and LEDs with the help of our Technology Lead Alois, the light strip didn’t work when the compartment was right side up. (But it was fully functional when the compartment was placed on its other five sides – go figure)! We were all befuddled, until Peter and Alois figured out that the issue was with a spring in the battery pack powering the LEDs.

 

Once we moved past that roadblock, the rest of the week leading up to the showcase went relatively smoothly. On Thursday – the big day! – we arrived early at the BRC to set up, eat lunch, and practice our pitch in the auditorium. It was really great to see everyone’s projects come together so well, and I enjoyed watching my peers proudly present their hard work from the summer. I’ve been working hard to improve my public speaking skills, and I was touched to hear from Ms. Volz and Ms. Mitchell that they were impressed by our presentation. I’ll definitely be reaching out to Ms. Volz during the school year for more public speaking tips, so I can continue to push myself in an area I’m uncomfortable with (I hear practice makes perfect, or something close to it).

I’ll be back for one last post soon to reflect some more on my internship experience (no spoilers, but I’m really grateful to have been a part of it). Until then!

Hi everyone! We got to work a lot on prototyping this week, and it’s been great to see our designs come to life in a more polished iteration than our low-fidelity prototypes. We rendered high-fidelity versions in Fusion 360, created Adobe Illustrator files with their proper dimensions, laser cut the files, and assembled them. We decided to create two medium-fidelity prototypes, which we scaled down to a fourth of their size, and one full-size sanitizing compartment to model our open circuit with LEDs. We’re using wood and acrylic plastic to create the prototypes, since those materials were most readily available at the OEDK. However, we plan to research alternate materials next week, since wood would likely not be used on a manufacturing scale. I got to stain the wood to a deep brown color outside the OEDK, which helped our prototypes look more polished. 

We also met with Joe Bailey this week to discuss the sanitizing compartment’s circuitry. His insights ultimately led us to create more open charging compartments in the UFO design, to allow for increased accessibility and airflow given the expected heat loss from the AC/DC converters. Today, we met with Jackie and Natalie Moreno, who gave us great feedback on our project pitch. We’ll be sure to incorporate it before practicing and finalizing our presentation. 

Despite the challenges this week presented, it’s been one of my favorite weeks from the internship. I’ve learned a lot of new skills in Fusion360, laser cutting, wood staining, and circuitry, and I’m proud of all the progress our team has made. Next week, we’ll be finalizing our visuals for the showcase, including animations of our Fusion360 renders, as well as our documentation to hand over to Rice360. I can’t wait to see everything come together, and it feels rewarding to be close to the finish line. Until next week for one last blog post!

The highly anticipated week has arrived! It is now time for us to get our hands dirty (in my case, burnt with hot glue) and bring our brainstormed ideas to life! 

 

Through our screening and scoring, discussions amongst ourselves and with our mentors, we moved towards low fidelity prototyping with the bucket building, the ladder, and the UFO.

 

The bucket building has an upper storage unit where different sized buckets can be hanged. I came across this idea on my “nature” walk around the OEDK, where the electrical lab utilizes very similar mechanisms to store hand tools. Electrical cords for charging will be organized in the removable back compartment, and UVC sanitisation will only operate when the door is closed. 

The ladder utilizes the same mechanisms for combined charging and sanitizing, but now in a wall mounted form with storage in drawers underneath.

The UFO, our unidentified fixed object, explores the concept of separating charging and sanitizing with separate levels to accommodate each function of the station. 

With these concepts, we used cardboard and various materials from the OEDK’s lo-fi cart. I had a lot of fun building these prototypes, and it was nice to test their physical feasibility moving from drawings to the 3D space. The process gave me invaluable experience to actually start thinking about spacing and how real dimensions would work as we move on to higher fidelity prototypes.

 

Our team also had the chance to give our project pitch to the leadership team and other colleagues, and we were extremely thankful for all the advice we received. Moving forward with medium fidelity prototypes, I am so excited for showcase on  July 21st. Even though the next weeks building up to showcase will be super hectic, I can’t wait to see our ideas become functional in medium fidelity conceptual prototypes. 

 

And that was a quick recap of week 5 of my wonderful summer journey. I look forward to seeing all of you again next week! In the meantime, go make your ideas come to life by starting with your own lo-fi prototyping!

Hi! Week four felt like it zoomed by as I really tried to soak up and enjoy the chaos of a very prototyping heavy week. Our main goals this week were to continue iterating on the kinetic hand model with some new changes as well as getting more organized and methodical with our changes. This week, we really learned how important it was to manage and tackle our preconceived notions about the solution and brainstorm more out of the box.

This week, we decided to add some more finalizing edits to the thumb position, to better adjust the thumb hinge hole where the thumb lies flat along the palm. This was one of the main changes my colleague JJ and I worked on which helped us dramatically gain more confidence in our CAD and modeling skills. Since we had to work to modify a pre-existing piece, we learned a lot about removing existing features, and creating new precise features that are properly scaled. Specifically we learned how to remove the previous hinge joint on the thumb and angle it in a new direction perpendicular to the base. It was tough yet valuable to learn how to use constraints, projections, and offset planes to create a new centered, perpendicular slot. There were many special considerations such as ensuring that existing hinges would still fit into the slot, a feat requiring precision and attention to detail.

Based on our last meeting with Eric, we also identified the need to add wrist support, to prevent his wrist from snapping backwards upon impact with the ball. After going through brainstorming and evaluating our solutions with a pugh scoring matrix, we determined adding triangular cushioning wrist hinges between the palm and the gauntlet would be the best mechanism. After some Fushion360, we were able to generate a simple design that worked fairly effectively with some qualitative testing. We plan to do some more quantitative testing in the future with force to prove that it takes more force to push the wrist backwards with the supports.

This quick iteration and success however did not continue on to all of the modifications we made this week. Rather, we may have become overconfident and skimped on the process of fully evaluating our solutions before making changes. Another change we planned to make this week was to strengthen the fingers and remove the contraction abilities, a feature we found unnecessary for basketball. We assumed that this could be easily done by disconnecting the tensioners from the gauntlet and tying them off at the bottom of the palm. After some minimal brainstorming, we low-fidelity prototyped some mechanisms by drilling holes in the palm. However, we were unsure how much this method actually adds to the stability and strength of the finger and that we may have over engineered a solution that could have been simpler. After more extensive brainstorming, we have a better solution, reinforced hinges, that we are going to prototype next week. Despite having wasted some time in our overeagerness to start prototyping, this did reinforce the value of low fidelity prototyping for us.

Hi everyone! It is hard to wrap my head around the fact that Week 5 of the internship has already ended. I think it is fascinating to think about how time has been flying by recently compared to when we were still in the brainstorming/planning phase. While it is scary that time is moving by so fast when we really need more of it, I also find it exciting to see our design take shape!

My team and I began the week by actually taking a step back and sketching out our design. We realized that, while we had a great conceptualized understanding of our prototype design in our heads, we were having some trouble communicating ideas about our project to our mentors and to people who weren’t as familiar with our project. Drawing out the individual limbs and the mechanisms associated with each joint was an effective way to close those gaps, and it was also a great way to make sure we were all on the same page in terms of the actual mechanisms.

                         

Figure 1. Leg Sketch                                                          Figure 2. Arm Sketch

Once we solidified our foundation, we were able to look into ways to make our models physiologically realistic. We initially looked into molding our limb parts and inserting them into our 3-D printed bone structure, but the process was very messy and very expensive as well. We then looked into 3-D scanning. The process includes placing our parts on a rotating platform. The scanner then takes pictures of the part at different orientations, and it then meshes these scans together to create the final 3-D scan. Even though I saw it all happen in real-time, it was still really hard to wrap my mind around the idea of a machine technologically capable enough to create such an accurate 3-D model. We then incorporated the 3-D scans with the existing bone structure through the 3-D printing software, and we were able to fully integrate everything! After so many weeks of playing around with mini models of the bone structure, it was really exciting to see a full version of the leg with everything incorporated. There is still a lot of fine-tuning to do, but this was a huge step in the right direction.

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Figure 3. Lower Leg 3-D Scan                                                      Figure 4. 3-D Printed Leg

Besides working on the physical design of our training model, we also created a pitch presentation for the design showcase next week. Not only was I able to work on crafting aesthetically pleasing and effective slides, but I was also able to practice learning how to distill our project context and design into higher-level summaries. The feedback that we received from our mentors opened our eyes to different aspects of information organization, and it also encouraged me to think about how the information we are presenting would be received by people who are not familiar with the design process.

While week 5 definitely had its challenges, we made a lot of great progress in terms of our design and presentation. The limited amount of time that we have has been tough, but I am confident that we will be able to continue making good progress!

 

See you next time,                                                                                                                                                                                                        Lam Nguyen