Final Reflections-Kelly
Our project was a method to prevent positional plagiocephaly. This design ultimately evolved to be the combination of a monitoring system and an inflatable bed that moved in accordance with areas of high pressure that is produced when a baby in the PICU is resting on one side of the bed for too long.
Following the culmination of the medical design project, I walked away with a few valuable lessons. First, I fully realize that you will never be totally happy with the end result, but you must reach a stopping point and prefect what you have in order to show that you have indeed made progress in your design thought process. After talking with the physicians and medical professionals, I realized that there is such a wide range of thoughts on how things should be run and what the procedure should be, that it is likely you will get conflicting thoughts no matter who you talk to and it is important to just take a thought and run with it and at some point, take what you hear “with a grain of salt” so to speak. This is not to say to ignore input and thoughts, but to just make sure you are not totally derailing your project to please a single type of nurse or doctor, but rather a majority. Bias is a real thing and is often distinguished by age and length of time in the profession. Second, the other large lesson that I learn is that sometimes a visual is the best option. I was at first a little self-conscious about our lack of physical prototype for the final product. However, I realized that if we were to create a physical prototype without any other supplication of our intended inflation + monitoring system design, it would not have done our device and final idea justice with the time that we had. Therefore, I was content with the fact that we had a simulation that perfectly represented what we were intending for the monitoring system and then a progression of drawings for the integrated design. A prototype (for the purpose of class) does not necessarily have to be an actual device but a concept solution will work just as well if it best depicts the final product idea.
On a separate note, I thought the video format was a great way to show the design process and final product. To be honest, I was very nervous and slightly frustrated that we were thrown into a project without any video background. I quickly realized that it was an outlet of creativity that is not seen in a powerpoint presentation and was pretty fun to make. So all in all, I turned out really liking it. I think with some more “lessons” on some basic video platforms, it would be a great aspect of the class to continue in the future.
BME Design 