Since arriving in Costa Rica on Thursday, our team has experienced quite a bit. We traveled to Invenio University and Liberia Hospital on Friday to acquaint ourselves with long-term GMI partners, including local professors and physicians, and to familiarize ourselves with two current GMI implementation projects: DialOasis and Consultika. On Saturday morning, we met with a GMI alum and Costa Rica native, Luis Diego, to learn about CAJA: Costa Rica’s public healthcare system. Later that day, we completed some pre-work for the med tech course that Dr. Richardson and Dr. Wettergreen will lead for both the GMI cohort and local Costa Rican students this week.
I ended up really enjoying that pre-work since it built on some skills I learned in two of my undergraduate classes: Medical Instrumentation Design and Design Thinking (I even used the same textbook we are currently using in the former!). Those skills include understanding when and how to use convergent thinking vs. divergent thinking, establishing a strategic focus and project scope, and developing strong clinical needs statements. In my normal everyday life, I tend to mull over conversations or observations I’ve had over and over (sometimes unnecessarily) and pick them apart and analyze them, so I consider some of these early needs-finding practices (i.e. observing and analyzing) to be within my natural set of abilities (although perhaps it isn’t so advantageous for my everyday life as it is for being a biomedical engineer!). In addition, sometimes it’s easy for engineers to jump to a solution too quickly, which can result in a poor design. For those reasons, I’m glad our group discussed the importance of these design thinking and needs finding skills.
Next we talked about design context, which involves delving into a clinical need by mapping out relevant existing technologies, potential customers, anatomy and physiology, and other information. Ahmad and I have partnered to focus on hand washing compliance among peritoneal dialysis patients. Many peritoneal dialysis patients neglect to wash their hands for the recommended five minutes and therefore risk developing harmful infections, so Ahmad and I will team up with some of the Costa Rican students in this med tech course to explore this need and develop a prototype to solve it. I’m excited to see what we come up with!
Photo: The sink where patients would wash their hands while undergoing peritoneal dialysis in the DialOasis system
Overall, my time in Costa Rica so far has been jam-packed with discovery, problem-solving, teamwork, and fun. It’s hard to believe that only three days have gone by, and I’m looking forward to experiencing what’s next!