Author: carterjterm
(Mini) Semester in Review
For the most part, I really enjoyed this class. It was a lot of work for all 3 of the projects, but all of the work was different and meaningful in its own way. The patient project was awesome because we got to work with a real person and get their feedback on an actual product that we were designing. It made me feel like a real-life product designer, which made all of the research and designing and data analysis so much more enjoyable than if it were a hypothetical problem set. For the personal health project, it was really insightful to see how designing a simple program for somebody might not be as easy as you would think, because the person has to actually follow your recommendations. Although the DesignWorks project was frustrating at first because I had almost no CAD experience, I got the hang of it fairly quickly and began to enjoy making the drawings. Overall, I would definitely recommend this course to a friend.
Day 8: The home stretch 1/13
The intensity of projects has really picked up now that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am really working hard to get prototypes out for my device and device-related software so I can get patient feedback to improve my project. I think we have a really good design, we just need to articulate the need for our product.
PHP: Having fruit in the classroom everyday has been a godsend for my partner’s health project. He went from averaging about half a fruit a week to having a serving of fruit every single day. I wish it was this easy to get him to eat more vegetables and drink more water.
Mid-class check in 1/12
PHP: I am glad that I suggested low effort changes for my partner to implement, because it has been hard to get them to adhere to my changes. They have made strides towards the goal, but they haven’t quite reached it in each category. Hopefully when I evaluate his physical and mental performance at the end of the week, the changes in his habits will show.
CAD project: This is simultaneously one of the most frustrating and the most rewarding projects that I have done. On the one hand the software has a learning curve and can be really angering when you can’t get one of the features to work, but on the other hand it is really satisfying to see your pieces get assembled together after they have all been drawn out. I don’t think it helped my patience, though, that I had to design one piece three times because it was deleted twice.
J TERM FOURTH DAY OF CLASS 1/7
Personal health project: The project has gone along fairly swimmingly, mostly because both my partner and I had already had the desire to work on the personal health goal that we picked for each other. I did run in to a problem, though. One of my metrics on my partner was a test of physical ability, namely the number of pushups and squats done in 30 seconds. I had to toss that data because we have been going to the gym together this week and the residual soreness from lifting weights affected his performance in pushups and squats.
Client project: This project is also going well. Our group has split in to two smaller projects. In the subgroup that I am in, we are trying to measure the stress levels of the patient through heart rate, heart rate variation, blood oxygen levels, and breathing rate. Hopefully we will be able to find correlation between this data and spikes in the patient’s blood glucose levels. Even if we don’t find that, our patient could still benefit from a stress detector due to the stress that type 1 diabetes already adds to their life.
J-term first day of class 1/4
Diabetes project: This projects seems very challenging, but also extremely interesting and rewarding. Our patient is awesome and very helpful. I think for the project we might want to go in the direction of finding a non-invasive way to measure blood sugar levels because the patient is very active.
Personal health project: I like this project because it pretty much forces me to work on a health habit of mine that I have wanted to work on because I have to follow the suggestions that my partner gives me or else they won’t follow my suggestions.
-Michael
BME Design 