It’s a beautiful morning in Malawi today, and I’m happy to report that our week has been quite successful! The beginning of this week started off on a good foot with our presentation to the electrical engineering staff at Poly. Our entire talk took about two hours, and we covered the basic set up of electrical engineering labs at Rice, the class objectives and goals, the equipment we used in the labs, and the final projects for the labs we completed. We were also able to demo some final project solutions that students have come up with over the years, hopefully beginning to showcase the ability of ELVIS protoboard and LabVIEW software that we brought with us.
After our presentation, Caleb also gave an impromptu introduction on how to use LabVIEW. As the professors pointed out, if they want to introduce anew software to students, they first need to be experts in the program; students will expect them to know all the answers about it! Luckily, there are several years until the first bioengineering class will reach the LabVIEW portion of their education, so the faculty has time to learn about the software.
Following our presentation, we have been working at Queens in the BTB office quite a bit. This past weekend, the Namitete team brought some of the missing parts for the technologies that we planned to get feedback on while we were here. Now we can actually begin to get answers to our surveys. Thus far, Jacinta and Emily have gathered data on the BiliQuant, ChemoSeals, and Incubator temperature sensor. In the next few days, Caleb and I hope to gain feedback on the dosing meter, and Aakash is going to introduce the concept of tablet vitals to the nurses. We have already received a lot of good feedback on the devices; hopefully what we are learning now will be able to be used constructively in design projects to come.
In addition to the technology surveys, Caleb, Jacinta and I have been working on an oxygen concentrator repair manual that is similar to the CPAP repair manual we created last week. Oxygen concentrators are much more of a black box than the CPAP, and as a result there is much less we can do to repair them. Therefore, our manual is currently quite short! However, in the final version of the manual we hope to also include some basic design background about how oxygen concentrators work, as they are not very intuitive to understand.
Otherwise, our week has been relatively uneventful. Now that we are back in the office at Queens, Caleb and I have had the opportunity to go to morning meetings again. Interesting cases are always discussed, and it’s a great way to learn! Additionally, Shilpa, a neonatologist from Texas Children’s Hospital, has just arrived in Malawi to help with the CPAP project. During the morning meetings, she has been giving Caleb and I insight into some of the finer points of the discussion that we don’t understand, while also explaining the different ways these cases are handled in the US. We have already learned a lot from Shilpa and I am certain she will be a great addition to the CPAP team!
In other news, Saturday was Becky’s last day in Malawi. Though we were all sad to see her go, we made the best of it – eating real-from-a-box-almost-american-brownies and singing “Happy Last Day in Malawi to You!”
