After a month of winter break that felt incredibly empty without GMI, I was so excited to return to Rice, catch up with the rest of the group, and get back into the swing of things.
We are three weeks into the semester now, and it’s been as eventful as ever. We started the semester off with some uncharacteristically cold weather, and actually had school cancelled for 2 days due to snow! The snow was fun to play in, but I’m definitely glad Houston has since returned to its comfortable 60˚ weather, and we’ve already gotten the ball rolling on projects.
This semester, we are tackling our implementation projects in a Sprint format. One person leads a Sprint with their team each week, where the whole team works on that project. Last week, Karlee led the Sprint for the TruWaves team and we focused on TruVent, Karlee and Chandler’s project. I really enjoyed getting the opportunity to learn more about this project and the chance to just dive right in. Chandler and I focused on building a prototype for a force-sensing mechanism that could be used when they test their bag-valve masks. We wired up some force sensors and used an Arduino to process the data, and we actually got the device to work! Moving forward, the team can now focus on tweaking this design and getting it ready for testing.
Aside from implementation projects, we are also starting to work on design projects that are based on the clinical needs finding that the group did last semester. One of the needs that I found is actually being turned into a project, which I am really excited about! I started thinking about this need during our trip to Costa Rica last semester. While we were in the NICU at Hospital México, we saw ophthalmologists inspecting the babies for retinopathy of prematurity (ROP). This got me thinking about this disease, and after some research and reading, I learned that the diagnosis and monitoring of ROP is actually really difficult in many parts of the world due to a lack of access to well-trained ophthalmologists. As a result, it is the leading cause of avoidable childhood blindness in the world – something that I found very troubling. Moreover, the problem disproportionately affects middle-income countries. Infant mortality rates are declining in many of these countries, but many patients still don’t have access to the quality of health care that they need. As a result, many infants are surviving long enough to develop ROP and, consequently, vision impairment. Because the disease is very treatable and manageable if diagnosed correctly, this seemed like an interesting opportunity for a design project.
I am working on this team with Anna, Siri and Ryan, and this past week we began researching and validating our need. We also had our project proposal presentation to the rest of GMI. Our team has already made a plan for the first half of the semester, and I’m really excited to see where this project goes!
All in all, I’m really excited about the direction my projects are headed in. It feels great to see so many things finally coming to fruition after months of hard work. I’m continuously impressed by the progress my peers are making, and I can’t wait to see where things end up this semester!