Hello my YT Channel Subscribers dear blog readers, my name is Eduardo Pagnoncelli Lorandi ( at this point, I’m fine with lpe1 ) and this week was when the things started getting interesting.

After finishing our Tapir project, it was the time for the big ones! The three already-running projects that we, the SEED Interns, would be responsible to carry on these next 5-6 weeks. Our TA’s introduced them to us, and asked to rank them in order of preference, and luckily( or not so), I got into the project I want: the Kasupe calibration project!

Ok, but what is this strange named thing called Kasupe?

Let me answer that: It is a Low Cost Syringe Pump, developed by the OEDK and Rice 360, which is supposed to be used in Malawi Hospitals. Also, let me explain the problem behind syringe pumps and why an device such as Kasupe was needed:

Syringe pumps, a device which should deliver medicine to patients with a constant, usually really slow, flow rates by pushing the plunger of a syringe,  are pretty expensive and dependent on specific syringe brands and models, being the second related to business reasons and also because it make easier to calibrate the device if the syringe specs being used are already known. But this is not the case of Malawi and development countries hospitals in general, which have low verb to purchase devices, and also have to lay on donations and unbranded syringes.

The Kasupe, a low cost syringe pump, already achieve one of it’s goals: being cheap, but they only work with specific syringes models, thus not completing all of its purposes. The project objective, as its own name says, is to make Kasupe work with any kind of syringe.

 

After the team S-Caliber(S for syringe, Caliber for calibration, or also caliber/inner diameter of the syringe) was given its assignment, we started doing some research about current syringe pumps, their functionality, types of syringes, the Kasupe itself, etc… so we could figure out the possible solutions to overcome this problem.