After several of weeks of doing data collection and being constantly on the road, it’s been nice to stay in Blantyre for a while! This week I made the switch from CPAP work to working with Caleb and Jacinta at QECH at the Poly, and it’s nice to use some more of my engineering and design skills!

 

ParagraphOn Monday Caleb, Jacinta and I were supposed to have a meeting at the Poly to discuss how we will implement our plans for demoing a systems and physiology lab – but unfortunately the meeting got postponed until Thursday. Luckily, we had more than enough work to do, and headed over to Queens to work on the CPAP repair manual. First we made a list of all the common breaks we have seen in the many CPAPs we fixed over the past weeks. Currently, there is only a repair guide for the most common type of CPAP break, a broken pump diaphragm. The new manual we are working on includes diaphragm replacement, but we also provide troubleshooting options for loose screws, leaks, and faulty valves. Hopefully we will be able to send out our repair manual to some of the PAM staff across the country who Aakash and I have met in the past two weeks; this is a great project and relatively simple to complete during our time here! We hope to finish adding our step by step pictures today, so we can show our work to Shannon tomorrow when she comes back from a hospital visit in Zomba.

 

On Tuesday, Caleb went on some CPAP travels to the central hospital in Zomba, so Jacinta and I headed over to the Poly to meet with Rodwell about another potential design project. He wanted us to look at a senior design project some elec students had completed this past year. Essentially the project is an IV drip regulator that uses an electrical circuit to control the amount of fluid dispensed by the IV bag. Currently Rice has a very promising IV drip device, so we were surprised at this assignment. However, Rodwell was interested in examining an electrical engineering solution to the problem, which had been solved using a mechanical engineering solution in the past. So after getting our new assignment, Jacinta and I headed back to our house at Cure to read up on electrical engineering. We ended up borrowing a thick textbook from Rodwell and learning about 555 timers. Though it was initially overwhelming, I feel like we have learned a lot in the 24 hours which we have been assigned this project. After with Rodwell today to go over a few constraints for our system, I am confident that we can come up with a feasible schematic in the next few days!

 

Today has been another relaxing and productive day around Blantyre. After meeting with Rodwell in the morning, Jacinta and I got our weekly Magnum ice cream bars from Superior market – a (new) Wednesday tradition and a nice taste of home! We are spending the rest of the afternoon blogging, finishing the CPAP manual, and putting the final touches on our systems and physiology lab lesson plans.

 

Unrelated to work, everyone in the house is looking forward to this weekend, when we plan on taking a trip to Lake Malawi. Lake Malawi covers a very large portion of the country, and is known for it’s delicious grilled Chambo (a type of fish) and beautiful lakes. We are heading up to the lake with some of our British friends, and plan to meet up with the St. Gabriel Malawi team as well! I cant wait to hear about their experience in Namitete, I am sure we will both have a lot to learn from each other!

Some pictures from the past week! Having fun and getting work done at the same time!