Week 3: Research, and matrices

Last week we did one calendar organize our project and now we are one day behind schedule. It is due the fact that we did not leave any to research. Thanks to Dr Wettergreen we spent all Monday researching and some time yesterday (Wednesday) as well. On Monday we learned a lot about the similar devices dynamics and yesterday Kalen found a very nice jack used to lift bikes that fits in almost all of our criteria. All this research will make us achieve the goal of finish the project. I think that now we are in the right way.

We also did one very nice activity. Our group, to understand the problem that caregivers have to lift people from wheelchairs to cars, tried transfer one of our team members to a car. One person was recording, other person was the caregiver and other one the patient. We realized that its almost impossible to do it and we just had success when we lifted the person without any device, as you can see in the video below, which, normally, does not happen, once the caregivers normally do not have enough force to lift the patient .

After that we worked hard in finish our design criteria and we had other session of brainstorm. Collecting all information, we had more than 25 possible solutions, so we went to the screening matrix and reduced it to just a few, then we did, today, the scoring matrix and reduced it to two possible solutions that we will make low fidelity prototypes and test together with the current prototype that we have from the previous team that worked in this device.

I am very exited to have a meeting with our client tomorrow morning and show her our weekly progress and I am very excited to start the construction of the prototypes. We can see the results of our hard work and we can see that the design process that we use is very efficient.

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