Hi all! We’ve had a busy week and a half since you’ve last heard from us. In the last ten days, we’ve had our medical design bootcamp, started our internships, and continued exploring San José.
Our bootcamp at the end of last week was a whirlwind experience that brought together five professors and over 100 students from 11 universities across the US and Costa Rica. After a few activities such as the Marshmallow Challenge, in which we tried to make the tallest tower we could out of dry spaghetti, tape, and one marshmallow, we split into teams of four to tackle an unmet healthcare need pitched to us by the professors and some fellow students. My group worked on a project to detect foot ulcers in diabetic patients at an early stage, before they progress into a serious infection requiring intense care. One of our group members, Verónica, is a general physician here in Costa Rica, and it was very helpful to have her perspective on the types of lifestyle challenges that her diabetic patients face. My other teammates, Manuel and Joanna, are also engineering students, and we enjoyed brainstorming all the different sensors we might use to detect early inflammation. Check out the photo above to see our prototype of a smart scale that can detect “hot spots” of inflammation on the patient’s feet!
Feeling fashionable in the OR!
After one day of rest, on which I joined the hostel’s yoga class and did some grocery shopping, we all started our internships! Pablo and I are assigned to Hospital Clínica Bíblica, where we’ll be rotating around several departments and conducting needs-finding observations, then prototyping a solution to a problem we’ve observed. This week we were assigned to watch surgeries in the OR. I was a little nervous that I would feel squeamish, since I tend to not do well with bloody scenes in medical or horror movies, but I felt fine the whole time. We watched a variety of different surgeries – a prostate resection, a C-section, a breast tissue biopsy, and a sinus surgery. The C-section was the most special, since we saw a new baby being born, but we had a very helpful conversation with the anesthesiologist of the breast tissue biopsy. He showed us how he sets up his machines based on the patient age and weight, and also showed us the ultrasound tool that guides the needle used to remove the tissue. Next week, we hope to have more opportunities to sit down with the surgeons to discuss in more detail what we’ve seen We plan to ask about their experiences with the various tools and understand any needs that haven’t been communicated to the hospital leadership.
Ravi, Sid, and Santi preparing chicken and rice
In the evenings, we’ve been having a good time cooking together in the kitchen and getting to know the undergrads who are also staying with us. We even met a Rice bioengineering alum by chance! He noticed Travis’s Rice cross country t shirt and came over to talk with us for a bit. It was such a funny reminder that the world really gets smaller and smaller the more you explore it.