Hey hey people! I have wrapped up my eighth week at Medevice here in Nairobi. Time is flying; I’m now in my last 2 and a half weeks of work. Last week, after many trials and errors, I was able to get both my handle and my filter attachment design fully printed with PLA using the FDM printer. 5 components need to be printed in total, 4 of which average about 3.5 hours to print. After many fails (either prints falling over, components breaking in preliminary function/structural tests, or filament not adhering to the bed property), I had my prints ready to go for Monday. I set up a meeting with a professor to use her wet lab to do the messy testing at Kenyatta University. Funny side story, as we she was meeting us in the parking lot to begin testing, she was carrying a baby kitten. She said she had just found him astray on the side of the road and was going to take him home to be her first-ever pet. She didn’t know what to do with him at all, and my coworker and I had to give her advice on what to feed him and show her how to comfort him, as he was super scared. By the end of the day, he was sleeping on our bags, and even on the lab bench we were working on. Anyway, testing yesterday went almost fantastically. I was able to test 5 different groups of products (my two devices individually, together, one market-available option, and the common Yankaer as a control) at three different pressure values, recording different parameters such as frequency of clogs and total time taken to suction effluent. After getting through 13 of my 15 tests about 6 hours into the day, my two parts broke! The high stress of connecting components used for vacuum was too much for my PLA prints, and the connectors finally gave way and snapped 2 tests before I was finished for the day. Back to the office we go for some more printing to finish my tests! Luckily, during the testing that was achieved, the proof of concept was totally validated. There are a couple of tweaks that I will have to reiterate in my next design before I leave; I will definitely have to make the filter attachment bigger to accommodate a larger volume of particulate. I will also try to reinforce my connectors so they don’t break as easily, which will help save on filament.
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I had some issues with testing that weren’t foreseeable before arriving at the scene. There were very limited resources to use to actually perform testing, things you don’t think about as a privileged American university attendee. We didn’t have paper towels to keep our work station clean or wipe up between tests. The water pressure quickly plummeted to a trickle after the first 2 or 3 tests, which made it very tedious to get water for the trials and cleaning. There weren’t simple tools like mixing sticks or knives. There weren’t measuring tools. While this wasn’t the university’s design studio, it was lackluster of equipment I would assume to be in a biomedical engineering lab. ‘Low resource setting’ in full effect! Because of this lack of measuring equipment, the amount of particulate I was adding to my mock effluent was more or less an estimate. Between two papers, 15-40 grams of simulated bone matter would’ve been sufficient, but without scales at the office or in the lab, there was no way of knowing for sure how much particulate I was using. I was also using a generous amount of gelatin pieces for simulated tissue fragments. Without the expertise of an orthopedic surgeon, there was no way of knowing if the amount of simulated particulate in my effluent resembled that of a real-world orthopedic surgical environment. After testing began, it became obvious that the amount and size of particulate was overestimated for my application and would hinder the efficiency of my devices being tested. However, for consistency’s sake, we used the same mock effluent for every trial for the validity of the results. Next time, I will definitely be defining my particle quantities with a trained eye.
In other news, last weekend Katherine, Emma, and I joined my colleagues to take a trip to the Toi Market. This is a huge outdoor clothing market in Nairobi where hundreds of vendors are trying to sell their second-hand stockpiles of clothes. Thrifting in the States is one of my absolute favorite activities to do; I’ve even made a side hustle out of it. Getting to spend hours digging through mountains of t-shirts was such a dopamine rush for me! It gave me a piece of home away from home. It was hard to hold myself back from buying every single shirt I wanted because they were priced at 100 shillings each, or about 75 cents. I ended up leaving with like 15 shirts and two belts, and now I have to figure out how I am going to get them all home. Everyone had tapped out and was ready to go home after 2 hours, and I felt like I was just getting started! I will definitely be going back before I leave. Aside from the thrifting, there was a fun work-sponsored networking/discussion panel where I got to work the reception desk and listen to a talk on AI in medtech. I also went out on a little solo excursion to a jazz bar, which was a ton of fun. I will admittedly say I spent a long time watching Scottie Scheffler dominate the field at the Open Championship instead of mingling with the crowd, but, hey, I was having fun. It was an awesome week, and I’m looking forward to having two more awesome weeks before prepping to go home! Adios!
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