Following the interview we had with our client at the end of the first week, we began our second week with a review of the interview. We documented all the different client motivations, expectations and goals for the project. This helped us to understand the problem with more depth and come up with a more refined problem statement. In short, our client tasked the team with coming up with a storage and charging station for handheld medical diagnostic devices. They also specified that the station should include a feature for automatically sanitizing the handheld devices.

Work on Understanding Problem Context continued on from Monday to Tuesday. We did research on the background of the problem to understand the situation in the low-resource settings that our client was concerned about. The main places of concern are Hospitals in Malawi that have partnered with NEST360 to end preventable newborn deaths in the region. Part of our research was on the availability of electricity and accessibility of power backup systems like solar in the hospitals. We found that hospitals in Malawi experience blackouts or load shedding on a daily basis, with most of them equipped with generators and solar power for backups, thus our solution will not prioritize having a separate power backup system. 

 Moreover, on Wednesday we delved deeper into the various methods for sanitizing medical equipment. We learnt that Ultraviolet (UV-C) light might be the best option thus far because it does not include any use of liquids that may damage the electronics of the storage station. However, because UV-C is harmful to human beings we will need to design the station in a special way that will not expose nurses to the radiation. 

For the remainder of the week we had several meetings with people from NEST360 as part of our efforts to gather as much information as possible about the conditions of hospitals in Malawi. We continued on research and documentation and Week 2 was done!