¡Hola a todos! This week’s blog post will be about the Medical Innovation Bootcamp that GMI students, Rice undergrads, and Costa Rican university students attended this week. This bootcamp took place at UCIMED, which is the oldest private medical school in Costa Rica. Without further ado, here are my lowlights and highlights for the week. 

Highlights

• Winning two sponsor awards at the Medical Innovation Bootcamp
• Getting to finally try Pops ice cream
• Costa Rican Pizza Hut

Lowlights 

• Uber Eats taking 55 minutes to show up leaving me 5 minutes to eat my lunch
• Eating junk food for 5 meals in a row
• My marshmallow tower being too ambitious and being an utter failure

MIB Day 1

Going into this bootcamp I was honestly quite anxious. Although I had extensively worked through the biodesign process previously in senior design, doing it in the span of 4 days seemed to be a very intimating feat. This first day focused on strategic focus, needs finding, and the research portion of the engineering design process. After a brief introduction to the bootcamp, attendees first participated in the marshmallow challenge. For those who do not know, the main goal of the marshmallow challenge is to create the tallest possible structure that can hold a marshmallow on top using nothing but tape and uncooked spaghetti noodles. Although our team was able to create a good looking tower, it ended up being too ambitious and completely fell over when we tried to put the marshmallow on top. We were quite embarrassed by this because we were a team of four people who have all previously participated in this challenge before. Afterwards, we watched a TED talk on the marshmallow challenge which explained how most students often spend too much time planning and not enough time testing the tower with the marshmallow, which is the exact trap our team fell into. This challenge taught me the importance of time management, as well as the importance of continuous iteration and testing. Before lunch we got to hear the project pitches for this boot camp which was very exciting. I got my first choice project, which was to create a wearable device that utilizes TENS therapy to treat those suffering from chronic foot pain. My team members were Laurel, Katy, and Sofia, a Costa Rican student. After much thinking and discussion, we decided on deTENSify for our team name. After team assignments were announced we quickly went through a design context review, where we researched statistics and background relating to chronic foot pain and TENS therapy. Through this, we learned that almost 50% of nurses are affected by chronic foot pain in the U.S. due to their work demand, which could lead to disability, low-motivation, and early retirement. 

MIB Day 2

The second day of the bootcamp focused on market analysis, developing design criteria, and brainstorming. This day primarily consisted of lectures followed by teamwork sessions. During my senior design, I did not play a very big role in performing the market analysis for my team. Because of this, I had to go out of my comfort zone to work on the market analysis with my team. We chose to look at people being affected by chronic foot pain in the U.S. and more specifically, nurses that are affected by chronic foot pain in the U.S. This ended up being a rewarding experience for me because through the lecture and discussion with my team, I learned a lot about estimating market segments and calculating the predicted financial opportunity. I now feel confident about doing the market analysis in future design projects. For our brainstorming phase, our team came up with three main ideas. One was to create a bandage like wrap that utilizes TENS electrodes, another was to create a compression sock that utilizes TENS electrodes, and our last idea was to create a shoe or sock insole that had built-in TENS electrodes. Out of all of the days, I felt that day 2 was the most rigorous due to the high number of deliverables we needed to fill out in a short amount of time. 

MIB Day 3

On the third day was all about evaluating our solutions and prototyping. After filling out the Pugh screening matrix, our team decided to move on with the TENS wrap solution. We thought about creating our device out of a material similar to sports wrap, which is self adhesive, water proof, flexible, and durable. Following the solution evaluation, we all participated in another engineering challenge: the Bajaj Challenge. In this challenge we had to create an open container that could hold two ping pong balls (the passengers) within it. Our bajaj will then get sent downwards on a piece of string zipline style and be slammed against a wall. The goal of this challenge is to keep the ping pong balls safely inside the bajaj when it hits the wall, while also having the fastest time. The materials for this challenge were all taken from Dr. Wettergreen’s extensive rapid prototyping suitcase. My team designed our bajaj to be extremely front heavy so it will go very fast down the zipline. We also created a mechanism that would dump our ping pong balls towards the enclosed end of our bajaj when it hits the wall, which would protect them from falling out during impact. On our first run our team got the second fastest time (although technically we have video footage of our team being the fastest). On our second run, although our bajaj was the fastest, it hit the wall on its side rather than the front, leading to a ping pong ball sadly falling out. I think everyone had a lot of fun with this challenge, and it forced us to think quickly and really use our creative juices. 

MIB Day 4 

On the fourth and final day of the bootcamp we focused on intellectual property, cost analysis, and finally, presenting our solution at the Innovation Symposium. For intellectual property, our team looked at current patents which may have an overlap with our solution. After searching, our team had concluded that our solution had a low to medium risk in terms of IP infringement. For cost, our team filled out a labor, burden, and materials sheet and was able to get our production cost down to $25. With our final deliverables finished, our team frantically worked on making final touches to our presentation slides before the symposium began. The Innovation Symposium was poster session style, meaning anyone could walk around to any poster to hear about the team’s design project. It felt like I was relieving my experience of presenting my senior design project at the Engineering Design Showcase at Rice. During the symposium, we made sure to emphasize the two best points of our device; 1. that our device only takes $25 to manufacture and most likely even lower at high production levels, which is much less than the $50-$100 price point of current TENS devices on the market, and 2. that our device was highly adaptable to any anatomy, meaning people with congenital foot abnormalities would be able to use our device unlike with a shoe or sock based TENS device. Our hard work payed off during the awards ceremony when it was announced that our team had won awards from two different sponsors of the bootcamp! Each of our team members received a large Anker battery bank and an Uber Eats gift card. Sofia was also awarded an internship at ICU medical and we were extremely happy for her and the overall success of our team. After the bootcamp had ended, our cohort went to Pops to celebrate our hard work during the week. I got the Churchill flavor, which consisted of strawberry ice cream with condensed milk and powdered milk which I liked a lot.

Overall, the Bootcamp was a grind. However, it further fortified my understanding of the biodesign process and ended up being a very rewarding experience. I look forward to taking what I learned during the bootcamp and applying it to future GMI projects during the school year. Tune in next week where I will talk about my clinical observation experience at Hospital Clínica Bíblica and my first week of my internship at Establishment Labs!