This week, we went to UCIMED and immersed with other Costa Rican engineering students through a BioDesign Medical Innovation Bootcamp. The UCIMED campus was very pretty; it was located on a hilly terrain and you could see the mountains across the road from UCIMED. As we filed into the auditorium on Day 1, we were greeted by a moderately-sized auditorium, which was also super cold since it had its AC on full blast. What a stark contrast to Hotel 1492! I put a picture below of the auditorium that we sat in for lectures, prototyping sessions, and professional development.
First day of bootcamp! It was hosted at UCIMED.
Scenes from across UCIMED
Katy handing Haruto his lunch
On the first day, we kicked off with the marshmallow challenge. Our team consisted of 4 US students who had done the marshmallow challenge before. As we set off to build, we focused a lot on discussing the base of the tower and how we would build future trusses. It was kind of sad though because at the end, our structure had fell, even though we had kept in mind the success points from when we had done this in undergraduate classes.This was definitely a humbling experience though, as it revealed how important iterative prototyping was in the design process. After the challenge, we furhter watched a TED Talk on how children performed better on the marshmallow challenge than business students because of this exact reason – because we had spent so much time scheming in the beginning, we did not have enough time for testing of our marshmellow tower toward the end of the time period, ultimately leading to our downfall. I do think our base was very structurally strong, but it just was not fully balanaced on all sides of the trangle base. At least the marshmallow was tasty though!
Haruto and Raniyah stand next to our fallen marshmallow tower
As bootcamp went on, we quickly were tasked with a design project to tackle for the week, which ended in creating a low-fidelity prototype and delivering a presentation. The design challenge I was assigned to was creating some sort of wearble transcutaneous nerve stimulation therapy (TENS) device that nurses could wear continuously during the workday to alleviate chronic foot pain from standing at work all day; as we quickly scoped into the project and selected a savvy team name (deTENSify), we got down to business during the bootcamp. I learned about “strategic focus” in biomedical design. (A strategy is rooted in action, while a plan is something in the future.) In further days of the week, we also refined our needs-finding research skills, market analysis skills, and ability to investigate customer needs. These customer needs then directly informed our design criteria, which we based our brainstorming of ideas off of. Our team included 3 US students and 1 tica, and we bounced a lot of ideas off of each other during the brainstorming phase prior to screening potential solutions. I think it is safe to say that we all learned a lot during this phase, but also had the most fun here because we could translate an idea from our brain into a physical representation. The solution we fleshed out the most was a flexible gauze-like wrap with adjustable electrodes attached to it. Other solutions (that were screened out) included a cuff-like electrode wrap, and a shoe insole with electrodes that could give patients TENS therapy.
Schematic of brainstormed solutions
During the prototyping phase, Dr. Wettergreen had warmed us up with the Bajaj challenge, which challenged us to design a bajaj that could safety and quickly carry two passengers (represented by ping pong balls) down a zipline and into a wall. Our device (sorry for no photo) took about 2.6 seconds to go down the cable, which is on the slower side, but our ping pong balls all stayed safe! After these crestive juices were flowing, we dove into low-fidelity prototyping of our selected idea. Utilizing paper as “athletic wrap” material, we stenciled out a sleek Y-like shape – the arms facilitating a user-centered fit around the patient’s foot. After wrapping each “arm” around the foot, patients could selected slide the electrode (represented by a button) up and down the slit on the wrap, so that this could accomodate for different feet sizes.
deTENSify low-fidelity prototype
Leading up to the symposium, I felt nervous to be officially judged, as the last time I had been in such an event, it was during my senior design course and during our enigneering showcase fair. My team practiced our pitch together a few times before the poster session, and shockingly it had seemed to pay off at the end – we ended up snatching prizes from company sponsors and won a huge Anker powerbank, as well as UberEats gift cards! It was so unexpected for us, but we were honestly just so happy that our hard work was able to be recognized by industry giants.
We ended our bootcamp journey with some POPS ice cream – and it was insanely worth it. I got dulce de leche, and you could say that it was a sweet end to the week.
I’m signing off now as I sleep before our Arenal excursion tomorrow! Until the next one!