Welcome back! Yesterday wrapped up the last day of the Medical Innovation Bootcamp, which was focused on the design process and all it’s steps – identifying a need, crafting needs statements, creating design criteria, brainstorming and creating a solution.
The days were structured around lectures from various faculty about the different phases of design, broken up by time for teams to work on their project. My team, Ultra Clean, was given the task of creating a way to make ultrasound probes more hygienic. We identified the need as, ” a device that will reduce infection in pregnant patients undergoing ultrasounds in order to increase both patients’ personal safety”. We spent the first two days researching the problem and ideating on solutions.
One of my favorite activities was the prototyping challenge to get us thinking critically about how to build practical yet low fidelity prototypes. I won’t spoil too much since it is a staple of Rice Design classes, so maybe you’ll get to try your hand at it! What I will give you is a picture of it, so maybe you can guess what it is (hint: a zip-line was involved).
The last day was spent refining our presentation and then presenting at a mini Expo, so that we could show off all our hard work to the other teams and to some judges. For our project, we landed on the Ultra Clean Canister – a UV-C device which works in tandem with photocatalysis film covers to help reduce infection while also not complicating the process for clinicians.
And, much to my team’s surprise, we won Best In Show! I am so unbelievably proud of the team and what we we’re able to accomplish in such a short time. A huge thank you goes out to all the staff and faculty to helped in this process and taught us so much.
This week also marks the end of our little group during these bootcamp as we all embark on the rest of our summer plans and various internships. Be sure to keep following them (and me!) along this summer on all the adventures!
