Jay Hanckel- Round 3: The Calm before the Storm
I should have been making more entries about my project, but alas time is not my friend this semester. I’ve finally found a weekend where I’m not drowning in work from the various facets of my life, so now seems like a good time as any to talk about the final project. My team has decided to focus on patients with CP (cerebral palsy) and the kinds of braces they use. We’ve met with 3 or 4 doctors about the subject as well as the best way that we could approach it in a timely manner, even though we have two weeks left to work on the project. At first, we wanted to try to help patients be more proactive in the brace-fitting process, so they wouldn’t have to be in discomfort for weeks until they could get a new brace. However, our mentors showed us that patients didn’t really notice the braces causing any irritation, so discomfort hasn’t been an issue in that regard. Our back up plan was to find a way to decrease the bulk of the braces (specifically ankle-foot orthotics, or AFOs) so patients could wear a more diverse range of shoes and demonstrate more functional independence. However, that would involve delving into a competitive market that we do not have the time for. So, our final project is going to revolve around orthotic compliance, meaning that the device tracks how often the patient is using the device. The doctors and orthotic technicians we talked to indicated that this would be the most helpful feature if added to the usual AFOs. So, after redoing our needs statement and criteria, we are sketching out solutions for tracking AFO usage.
In other news, we are also making a video for our final project (or that’s my interpretation of it). I’m actually very excited and concerned about doing this kind of work because I have a lot of ideas for how to handle the video and how to include all of the information, but I have zero experience with video editing. I don’t have a Mac, so we’ll see how well that goes.
BME Design 