Unfortunately, a family wedding that I needed to attend followed by a Summit for a nonprofit for which I work required me to be away from San José for most of this week. However, my hard work in the previous week in person set me up well to tackle device market and implementation research for our bionic hand design, being to synthesize my large accumulation of needs finding opportunities, and work on a side project that I am collaborating with an occupational therapist at Hospital Nacional de Niños (HNN) on. I am working with her to proofread translation on a document for a novel method of splint application to children’s feet, so like my other tasks, this could be done virtually.
Planning of these tasks allowed me to continue contributing to HNN despite being unable to be there in person. The Summit that I went to was on behalf of an organization called Team IMPACT, which matches kids battling serious or chronic illness with college athletic teams. As a Student Fellow for the organization for four years, I have become extremely passionate about the mission of this organization, which focuses on treating the mental side of children’s diagnoses such as cancer, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases. In this way, the organization’s mission is not far from my work at HNN, where I am working with a similar patient population, just in a different language. These children deal with many of the mental issues that Team IMPACT’s matches must work through.
The Summit provided a valuable experience because much of it dealt with health reforms that need to be implemented to better deal with mental health issues in pediatric patients and how to go about implementing that while supplementing the clinical model of the organization with data quantifying its success. I was also able to meet lots of amazing student athletes and clinical workers from across the world where I discussed my work at HNN and got valuable feedback.
The full group of student athletes from across the United States that met at the 2023 Team IMPACT Fellowship Summit.
During my time at the Summit, I was able to make headway on finalizing the splint documents while also working to research numerical design criteria with justification for the bionic hand project that we are going forward with. In addition, I have finalized relevant standards to address at this phase of our project and a proper pathway to implementation for this device. Since I got back to San José at the end of this week, I fully intend to hit the ground running with getting the working prototype ready!