For the third week of SEED, we jumped headfirst into our new engineering projects. As part of the newly named team “Foot for a King”, I am tackling diabetic foot ulcers. When people with diabetes lose feeling in their feet, injuries can regress into ulcers without warning. We are creating a device to allow patients to inspect their feet in between podiatrist visits. With 8 hours a day, we have plenty of time to tackle this challenge.
We started the week with lots more research on aspects of this medical problem. We looked at other similar solutions, like SirenCare smart socks. These new products monitor the temperature of feet to check for infection, but they can be washed like normal socks. We also found many 3d scanners, infrared thermometers, and other diagnostic tools. We looked into patents for many related technologies, like hospital monitoring systems, and many unrelated technologies, like umbrellas, crutches, and luggage. These research topics give us greater depth of knowledge about our topic and mechanisms we could use. After a few days of research, we jumped into design criteria. Here we defined standards of success and failure for our project. For example: it must last longer than 2 years, cost less than 100 USD, and be able to detect marks in >80% of locations of a foot.
We almost run out of whiteboard space trying to capture all our ideas
After design criteria, we had several massive brainstorming sessions. We wrote every individual idea on a notecard that we posted on a whiteboard. For the first two sessions, we thought of complete ideas and larger concepts. For the third and fourth, we focused more on decomposed design blocks: smaller ideas for a specific part of the design. In the end, between complete and partial concepts, we had 165 total ideas, all in the form of notecards on a single whiteboard! It was monumental. We organized these ideas into groups, then screened individual design blocks to find the best of each. In this process of Pugh Screening, we score each design relative to a standard in each design criteria. This does not help choose a single solution, but can narrow down from 30-40 to 6-12 easily. After this process, we combined design blocks into complete ideas with Morph Charts. Here, we can combine partial ideas into full solution. This gave us a total of 48 complete solutions, an unwieldly number.
We pick a group of 9 stationary devices and screen them, pulling out 3
With our 48 solutions, separated into handheld devices and stationary ground devices, we began another marathon of Pugh Screening, this one lasting 6 hours. The goal for this step was to get from 48 to less than 10, and it was a mess. We had two separate groups of screens for just handheld devices, then three for stationary. This was arduous and lasted roughly the entire day, but by the end, we had . . . 13 solutions. Just a little too many. To move on, we needed to get rid of just four or five, but we couldn’t just remove some, these were the best of the best! To overcome this vast hurdle, we devised the Champion’s League, where the winners from hours of Pugh Screening would be screened . . . again. This was not to find the best, but only to get rid of a few. Here we devised the motto of the Champion’s League: “Winners shall not be chosen. Only losers shall be eliminated.” I type now, wondering who will emerge as survivors from the screening matrix, and who will fall, never to be prototyped.