Week three of SEED and I have officially settled into my place on team “Started From The Bottom (Now We’re Here)”. This week we continued the process of brainstorming and selecting a solution to move on to prototyping. While the work we’ve done is extremely important, these past four days have definitely felt like we’re starting at the bottom.

To begin this week, we presented some of our background research and brainstormed ideas at the morning meeting with the other interns and instructors. However, we soon realized that all the teams were lacking in research material. Thus, we all trekked back up to the computer lab to delve deeper into simple machine mechanics, existing solutions, and ADA regulations among other material.

After exhausting our internet resources, we decided to conduct some tests in person to gain a better understanding about the problem. We used an old transfer wheelchair at the OEDK as a model and tried to transfer each other from the chair to a car. We attempted this transfer at least 10 different times with different configurations, yet were unsuccessful every time. When you’re trying to lift a person that is heavier than you, and you have absolutely no assistance, it feels impossible. This simulation made the transfer problem very real for us, and definitely motivated us to create a great solution.

This is a video of one of the later attempts. After nothing going right, we thought maybe sheer force would lift the patient… (sorry, Kalen).

 

On Tuesday morning, we finished defining and ranking our design criteria. Some of the criteria include vertical lift, ease of use, weight of device, and durability. It will be challenging to create a device that will meet every single attribute. Yet our team is dedicated to producing the best possible solution for the task at hand.

 

Tuesday afternoon we got a refreshing break from the engineering design process in form of a 3D printing/SolidWorks workshop. I have had some experience with CAD, yet most of my experience has involved 2D drafting for architecture. Learning how to create actual engineering sketches in 3D was daunting at first, but got easier as the workshop progressed. Learning how to 3D print was surprisingly easy and I can’t wait to print literally every idea that comes to mind (after all, I can justify it by saying it’s for practicing printing 😉  ).

 

After such an eventful and interesting afternoon, it makes sense that the following day was a bit more dry. I guess there has to be some sort of balance with everything. On Wednesday, my team spent the entire day screening our brainstormed ideas. In no less than 8 hours and 7 screening matrices, we narrowed down our brainstormed solutions to the final 8 contenders.

Now the “fun” part…. scoring.

A scoring matrix involves ranking your brainstormed solutions against your design criteria. It is heavily quantitative and difficult because certain design criteria cannot be tested until after the device is built. For instance, we cannot have caregivers rank the ease of use of a device that has not been created yet. In order to account for the ease of use criteria, we performed calculations to determine the mechanical advantage of each brainstormed solution based on the simple machines that make up the device (e.g. pulley, wheel and axle, screw, lever, etc). It was a long, tiring 8 hours, but we emerged victorious with a clear design winner. Behold… the first “Started From The Bottom” transfer device sketch.

The winning device is a scissor lift mechanism with a chair for the patient to sit on. The chair also contains a detachable sliding board for lateral movement.

So there it is. Another 40 hours in the life of a Rice engineering SEED intern. With all the matrices running through my head this week, I’d like to finish this post with one final matrix of the real life decisions my brain was making. Enjoy!

	Go Shopping	Stay At Home	Go To Work
Intellectual Stimulation	–	0	+
Financial Gain	–	0	+
Entertainment Value	+	0	–
Overall Net Work	–	0	+
	-2	0	+2

Obviously, working at an amazing and interesting (albeit occasionally dry) job won out. Until next week..