Author: Emily Dooley
And in the end
I think the thing that I like the most about this class might have ended up also being the thing that I started out liking least about this class. We do things over and over and over again.
At first this was need statements. Generating need statements. Reading need statements. Looking for need statements. Short need statements. Long need statements. Need statements with patient populations. The same need statement for a different population. The same population but a different need. Reasoning for the need statement in the need statement (needception?). Talking to doctors about need statements. Changing need statements. Better need statements (can they really be better or just different or more focused?) More focused need statements. Realistic need statements (unfortunately it didn’t seem that anyone was going to be able to cure cancer in half a semester). At first this seemed like a lot of repetition without much progress, but looking back on it those need statements sure did get better.
Then we moved on to solutions and prototyping at the end. We thought we had done lots of drawings and the first lo-fi prototype would make all of our wildest dreams come true. Sure enough, we were dead wrong. As with pretty much everything else you don’t get things right on the first try (we didn’t get it right the second time either). We kept prototyping and drawing and revisiting those need statements. We kept repeating. There were changes every time so if we get technical with the vocabulary: we were iterating. Iterating can take you down many paths and it seems as though you could really do it infinitely. I’m starting to think you never get it completely right. There’s always you think could go better or look cleaner. There’s always another way or material or set up that you want to try, but at some point you have to stop and show people what you have.
So we did things over and over and over again. At first I wanted to move on. I wanted to do the next thing. I wanted to learn the next step. Then I realized the act of doing it over and over and over again is the next step. You never get things right the first time, sometimes you don’t get them right the 10,000 time (just ask Thomas Edison), but you do get better. We don’t get that chance in many classes. Most classes we see something once and then we are expected to know it again on the final. I liked getting to try things over and over and over and actually get better. That’s the real goal isn’t it? We want to get better. We want to make things better for other people: for patients, for doctors, for parents. So we keep trying different things over and over and over again.
Asking questions is hard.
Getting useful answers from people is even harder.
I had never considered how hard coming up with a good question is. I mean I ask questions everyday. You can ask questions about anything: What’s your favorite color? Where do you want to go for lunch? What’s an appropriate statistical test to run on the data we acquired so we can actually draw a conclusion from this data we spent weeks collecting? But coming up with a good question is much more difficult.
First of all you have to figure out what you really are interested in learning about. Is it really that we want to know what vitals are being monitored electronically in the PICU or rather what the routine of the nurses is as they work with this system and where it fails? Some of these things may sound similar, but slight changes in phrasing lead to very different answers. This was a confusing thing to figure out. We wanted to go into clinic to get answers from people that knew what they were talking about and would be able to help us answer the many questions we thought we had. But actually going into clinic and talking to professionals was a little intimidating. I made up a list of almost 40 questions, but it seemed like we went through them in less than 10 minutes and we hadn’t learned anything at all.
So then I tried to keep asking. We kept being told to try and dig deeper. So I did and I think I got there… eventually. Rephrasing and following up on answers over and over again seemed repetitive to me, but as I kept asking the respondent’s answers seemed to get closer to things that were actually what I was there to be finding out. Other times I would try to follow them down a rabbit hole and it would turn out we were quickly diverging from the helpful information.
As we continued to go back into clinic I got better at this, or I at least felt more comfortable with it. I think the biggest thing is being prepared. Going in having the best idea possible of what you’re trying to find out and having already done some amount of research certainly made it easier to talk to physicians and nurses. This also became easier as we got further along in our project idea. Once our concept had actually materialized it was easier to ask questions around finding out how our device would fit into the current work flow. It also allowed for asking less general questions and more specific things as they pertained specifically to our project.
There seems to be an art to asking really good questions. It’s not easy, but it is possible and it seems that the more you do it the better you will be. The better you become the better answers you will be able to get. This is definitely worth the effort because while it may take more time on the front end, that time would be small compared to the potentially wasted years or decades of working on a project that turns out to not actually be based in a definite need.
Well, that would be cool…
There are a ton of things that would be cool to build or research or modify out there. There are a ton of different ways that you could build them or conduct research about them or modify the existing devices and technology.
But should you?
We were rolling along just like everybody else working on our need statements: adding synonyms, rearranging clauses, attempting to stay away from solutions, all sorts of really cool stuff. We were even moving into what must a solution to this need have and what do we want it to have.
This was the point that we realized we knew pretty much nothing about the thing that we actually wanted to accomplish. Sure, we know enough about electrodes and wireless signals to create a solution. It would probably even be a really cool solution. It would probably do something really cool. But would it help anybody? Would anybody actually use it?
We realized we had more questions then answers so we turned to the keeper of all knowledge: Google. Google’s great and we found answers to a lot of the more general stuff about monitoring systems and electrodes and how much a company would sell you one for. Again, this was cool, but unfortunately Google couldn’t tell us everything we wanted to know. It couldn’t tell us how parents interacted with the monitoring system, how nurses felt being responsible for maintaining the system, or the workflow around the many parts of the system. To answer these we needed to get off the Internet and into the real world.
So we went and saw Dr. Frank. If you don’t know Dr. Frank she’s one of the PICU doctors and she’s great. We asked Dr. Frank some of our questions and she quickly pulled nurses, that were not busy to come talk to us. This was great. There were a bunch of things that we would never have found out from Google. For example: the box where you plug in all your electrode leads, pulse oximeter, and blood pressure cuff is really heavy (probably in the ballpark of 40-50 pounds) and it hangs above the patient. This can be scary for nurses when the patient has to be moved and they have to get this brick down without disconnecting the patient. They don’t want to drop it on the patient. That would be uncool.
Dr. Frank even introduced us to one of the parents that was there. From the Mom we got to hear a lot more about how things get in the way and how things are confusing. She stressed that even just knowing more about whatever is going on makes the whole thing less scary.
All of this was cool. We were learning a lot. We were getting references to back up our musts and wants that have to be submitted at the end of the week. All in all trip was a ten out of ten, I definitely recommend getting off your laptop and going to talk to someone that literally gets paid because they know what they’re talking about.
But as we were walking out we realized something: our need didn’t match their need.
They were involving the same topic, but what we were targeting to fix is not what actually needs fixing. It’s not totally back to the drawing board and most of our “must haves” and “wants” for the solution still apply.
But we need to refocus.
We need to target the problem that actually needs fixing.
This is an iterative process. We started down one path and now we’re going to try another. Sure, we spent a bunch of time on what is now probably irrelevant to our end goal, but that’s cool.
That’s cool because this isn’t about us. We aren’t the ones that need something fixed. We aren’t the ones that will be using the solution everyday. In our case it’s nurses, parents and patients that will be using this solution. So we have to go back a couple steps. That’s cool.
That’s cool because this is about them.
Casey and Dooley do a PHP
Some initial realizations:
In relation to counting calories, some challenges we encountered were:
- portion size is hard to control when cooking
- knowing exactly what’s in everything is challenging
- recording everything exactly
- trying to work towards the goal while collecting data is hard
In relation to training for a ten-miler:
- figuring out how to count cross-training as data was hard
- the fact that this was a project for Casey dramatically increased motivation to do it
- I would get bored before the end of it
- process becomes very repetitive
After greater contemplation, our results can be summarized as follows:
- Data visualization is hard.
- How do you present it in a way that makes sense for what it is visually and quantitatively?
- How do you make sure it will make sense to others? (I mean they made sense to us while we were working on them… but then we presented… and found the holes.)
- Which part of the data is important/relevant and should be prominent in the visualization?
- How do you present meaningful findings with limited data points? (We only did eleven days…)
- It seems that you get better at this the more you do it. This was pretty much our first shot, so it makes sense that we fell a little short. After seeing everyone else present, and all the various ways that you could present data, we now have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. One that worked well was how Kelly presented Tom’s stretching data all in reference to a central toe line. This increased understanding should give us a better starting point for the second round of the PHP.
- Data collection is hard.
- How do you motivate a partner to generate data?
- How do you decide what aspects of their life would make relevant data points?
- Is there a way to measure what you determine to be a relative data point?
- Can you check that these data points are an accurate representation of what you’re actually trying to accomplish?
- How can you minimize the effects of the data collection on the behavior trying to be measured?
- Our data collection seemed largely based on trial and error. We would attempt one intervention and see if that worked. When it failed, we would try something else. In the end it’s that wee know how to get the other to do something, but more that we know a bunch of ways that won’t get them closer to their goal. (Sort of like Edison and the light bulb.) The act of needing to collect data for our partner motivated us to collect it. (We’ve both fallen off the wagon since the project ended.) Seeing this dramatic difference between when we were collecting and now that we’re not leads us to believe that the simple act of someone else holding us accountable greatly increases the likelihood of our compliance with the intervention.
- Life is hard.
On our honor, we wrote this together. E.A.Dooley & W.C.Harrison
Day 1: Me
The party line is that I’m a third year BME, but I suppose most of us are so that’s not all that helpful for getting to know me…
In light of upcoming events I would like to say that I see the impending large accumulation of snow as an opportunity and not a problem. This is mostly because I like snowboarding and powder days are the best days.
I’m in this class because I think I learn more by doing projects than sitting in lectures and I really like trying to solve problems, especially by building things.
It would be cool to come out of this class with a capstone project, but I think I mostly just want to learn more about the whole design process. This will be beneficial to whatever project I do next year, and later in life, regardless of whether or not it is a continuation of this semester’s project.
~Emily Dooley
BME Design 