Last Wednesday and Thursday we got our project assignments and did some preliminary research and brainstorming, but we really got started with our project on Friday. On Friday afternoon my team and Dr. Hunter took the metro to meet with out client, a physical therapist at Shriner’s hospital (and Rice alum!). The client interview went well, and we got many of our questions answered. The only surprising thing about the client interview was that while the original team was given a budget of $150 (and failed to meet this budget), the client gave us a budget of $50, which is a tough goal to meet. While at Shriners, we also learned about various types of orthodics and prostheses, and visited the gait and motion analysis center.

 

On Monday, after discussing our project progress with the other interns, we had a research day. The majority of the research I did was about how certain lifting mechanisms, like hydraulic pumps and scissor jacks, work. In the afternoon, after we felt that we had done sufficient research, we took a simple wheelchair out to Jake’s car to see how hard it actually is to transfer someone into a tall car. As the smallest and weakest team member, I volunteered to be lifted, which resulted in being thrown into the backseat of the car repeatedly, as seen below. We attempted about 10 transfers and none were successful, even with 2 lifters.

On Tuesday morning, we defined our design criteria. These included safety, size, vertical lift, and weight capacity. On Tuesday afternoon, Jeremy, our TA, did a Solid Works and 3D printing workshop. This was really informative and interesting, especially since I had never used Solid Works nor 3D printed. Through this workshop I also discovered a fantastic website called Thingiverse that is full of 3D printable models of both useless trinkets and helpful items. Later in the week I tried to 3D print a bendable snake during lunch and it failed 4 times in a row :(. I then printed an octopus with bendable tentacles and it succeeded, kind of.

On Wednesday we did Pugh screening for the whole entire day. It was tedious but also productive, because it allowed us to narrow down our approximately 30 brainstormed solutions to about 8 that would go into our Pugh Scoring matrix. On Wednesday afternoon we  began to make the 1 to 5 scales for our Pugh scoring matrix, but struggled to make scales for the criteria that we could not directly measure from our sketches, such as weight capacity and weight of device. We ultimately had to do more research to estimate these values for each proposed design.

Today we completed our Pugh Screening matrix. The two devices that scored the highest were both devices involving scissor lifts. One design involved a hand-cranked scissor lift that the wheelchair user wheels onto. The lift then lifts the entire wheelchair and patient to the desired height. The patient would then use a sliding board to transfer into the car. The other solution is essentially the same hand-cranked scissor lift, but it has a seat on it onto which the wheelchair user transfers. We ended the day  by making some detailed sketches of both solutions so that we all understood exactly what the solutions would look like and how they would work.

Tomorrow we will visit Shriners again for a transferring workshop to help us better understand the problem. Next week we plan to start low and medium fidelity prototypes of one or both of our designs. We will also give a mid-internship presentation about which device we have chosen to build and the progress of our project. I can’t wait to begin prototyping one of the solutions that we have thought about and analyzed for the past couple of weeks. It’s so cool to see a project that began as a simple idea come into being, and I look forward to seeing how our project will evolve over time.