Wow, it is already time to blog again. It’s been a short week due to the 4^th of July occurring on Tuesday.

Despite the week being very short, Team Gotta Cast ‘Em All has made a lot of progress. To recap, our goal is to create a more effective casting stand for patients needing prosthetic limbs. My team’s top three final solutions were sent to our client at Hanger Clinic last week, and our client responded back with preference of our second highest scoring design. Therefore, we are moving forward with the design our client chose.

Last Friday, our team also began low fidelity prototyping to begin to see how our final solution would physically look. The following images are our low fidelity prototypes of the design that we will be continuing to develop.

                                    

On Wednesday, our team divided the tasks that needed to get down so that we could finish them quicker. Tori made our midsummer presentation, Liz and Blessings constructed a low fidelity model of a weld-in pin and sewed a cushion, and I made the first version of our CAD drawings for our final design solution.

The spring loaded pin works as it should, and helped us better understand how the mechanism works and how it will be used in our device. The cushion that Liz and Blessings sewed appears high quality and replicates a smaller model of the pillow cushion that will be featured in our device.

Low fidelity version of weld-in pull pin	Scaled down version of cushion

I spent the entire day on Wednesday creating a CAD drawing of our casting stand design. To create the model of our device, I used SolidWorks to create individual components of the device and integrated these components into an assembly, where the shape and structure of our device began to take form.

The device that we are building is a hybrid design, where the patient has the option of standing in two different positions. The patient can either wrap their arms around a cushion or lean their back against a cushion and rest their arms on an armrest. The device is height adjustable to fit patients from 3 ft in height to 6.5 ft. The armrests are also adjustable, and can move inward and outward to accommodate varying sized patients. The hugging pillow cushion is removable such that there are multiple sized cushions for patients of varying sizes to use.

Today, our team presented our final design solution to our instructors and the rest of the SEED interns. Overall, I am very happy with my team’s performance and am excited to continue designing our casting stand. Our team’s goal is to have a working prototype able to be delivered to the Hanger Clinic at the end of this summer.

Because the 4th of July was this week, we of course had to show the international students our American traditions. The day before, a few of us traveled to HEB to buy ingredients for baking and a barbecue. We successfully baked a crispy peach cobbler and zucchini chocolate cake (chocolate salad). Despite the ingredients used in the zucchini chocolate cake, it was indeed yummy. Manuel and Christina also made a questionable flan that I would classify as a smoothie rather than flan. On the 4th, we ate dinner together and went to the outdoor theater at Hermann Park to listen to the symphony and watch fireworks. We manage to stay at Hermann Park long enough to take this picture and listen to a few songs from the symphony, but we decided to leave so that we could watch the fireworks from a balcony in one of the dorms.

Last Friday, a few of the SEED interns and I cycled in the Critical Mass ‘social ride’. Despite being a social ride, with thousands of cycles taking over the street, the ride was more arduous than we had originally thought. We managed to cycle roughly a marathon (~26 miles) through places that were no longer in the Houston city limits. Regardless of the unexpected challenge we faced, I had a great experience .