Month: May 2015

What We’ll Carry

Posted on by Sarah Hooper

When I fly to Blantyre, Malawi this Saturday, I will carry with me many things. Emily, Catherine and I have spent the past three weeks working to determine, prepare, and pack all that we anticipate needing for our internship this summer at the Polytechnic University of Malawi (“the Poly”). To help explain what we have been up to and what we will be doing for the next ten weeks, I have made a list of a few things we will carry with us:

  • Suitcases. We will each tote two very stuffed suitcases—one filled with materials for the internship, the other filled with personal items—that have been strategically packed to almost exactly 50.0lbs each (trying to avoid those overweight baggage fees). Here are a few things filling the internship suitcases:
    1. Over a hundred electrical components. One of our goals during the internship is to develop new health technologies for use in low resource settings. We will be working on teams with Malawian students, combining each of our strengths to hopefully begin solving some of the healthcare challenges we observe around us. However, we don’t know exactly what projects we will be working on, nor what materials are available, nor what resources are needed. Emily, Catherine, and I—the Poly interns—have spent a good chunk of time creating and ordering a grand list of basic prototyping materials to help enable the innovation of new technologies over the next two months.
    2. Funnels and bike pumps. There are a few projects already in the works at the Poly, though prototyping has been made difficult by the lack of available materials. While we had the luxury of access to abundant resources in Houston, we ordered dozens of parts that we predicted and heard were needed to further these existing Poly design projects. Some of these projects include a phototherapy dosing meter, a mechanical breast pump (this is where the funnels and bike pumps come in), and an automated blood pressure sensor.
    3. Bouncy balls, pool noodles, and extra-long pipe cleaners. Two Rice faculty members will be traveling to Blantyre for a week during the summer to teach a design workshop to the Poly faculty. Part of our responsibility as interns will be to assist with this workshop, which includes hauling over a ton of materials beforehand. Additionally, we have a list of a few dozen materials to buy in Malawi, which we look forward to using as a means to explore the city!
    4. New technologies. For me, one of the most inspiring experiences thus far in my entire education has been the opportunity to help create relevant and needed healthcare technologies. There is great potential for these technologies to really have a positive impact, however a barrier to their long-term success is technology adoption; if a doctor or a nurse doesn’t like the device, there is a high probability it won’t be used, no matter how well it works. An important step in the development of new technologies is initial feedback, which is where the interns come in. All of the interns have spent time the past three weeks prototyping around nine new technologies, most of which have been developed this past year by students in the global health program. I’m particularly excited to hear feedback on the bCPAP heating sleeve, which is the product of my team’s labor from this past semester in Global Health Technologies 360: Appropriate Design for Global Health. All of the interns learn how to describe and answer questions about each new tech so that we can present these developing devices to healthcare workers in Malawi and get their feedback about what they do—and don’t—like. It’s one of the ways that we, working as students in Houston, have a chance to develop technologies that are needed and liked by healthcare workers in Malawi.
  • Laptops. The fourth, unofficial member of our internship team is Google Drive. In addition to gathering physical materials before departing, we’ve been having meetings with Rice faculty to gather information to help with one of our biggest tasks this internship: designing and implementing an engineering orientation week for incoming engineering students at the Poly. This project will be ongoing throughout the internship, culminating in our final week when we actually execute this orientation week. In order to prepare ourselves to create this event, we spent time meeting with Rice’s engineering faculty, the director of the engineering leadership program, students and faculty involved in Rice’s freshman orientation week, and professors who teach the engineering design process. We know that our conception of this orientation week will change as we spend more time in Malawi with the Poly students and faculty, however we have gathered many ideas, materials, and insights in hopes that they can be tailored to help create a novel engineering orientation week at the Poly.
  • Chichewa flashcards. We’ve been given an incredible learning opportunity to go to Malawi and live and work in the context for which we are designing health technologies. We will have the chance to get to know the nurses and doctors who use the technologies, the engineers who fix them when they break, the students who will design many future technologies, the professors who guide these students, and the mothers whose infants are treated with the technologies. In order to best form these relationships, we thought it would be a good idea to try and learn words and phrases in one of the major languages of Malawi, Chichewa. Even though my accent and pronunciation right now is awful, hopefully it will help to at least try!
  • A healthy dose of excitement (and nerves). At the beginning of anything new, I always feel a nervous, eager anticipation. I feel this especially now, as what is coming is something I regard as very important, but is also very unknown. This opportunity will afford me the chance to learn and contribute things I wouldn’t otherwise be able to. It is a chance I am humbled and grateful to have, and I hope to somehow live up to the potential it has created. We have done our best to prepare, filling up flashcards, suitcases, and Google Drive folders, but it is impossible to really know what is going to come next. My role and perceptions will shift throughout the next ten weeks, and the projects I will be working on will most likely take a shape vastly different from the one I have created so far in my head. I don’t know in what final form the funnels, the pool noodles, or the (currently) poorly-pronounced Chichewa words will be used, but I do know that a passion for the work will hold steady, if not grow stronger. Acknowledging the unknown and growing comfortable with the probability of continuous change will hopefully best enable me to progress through this internship open minded, open to recognizing present needs and meeting them as opposed to imposing any other agenda, and open to new lessons, new work, and new ideas.

And So We Begin!

Posted on by Tanya Rajan

I don’t think the reality of my upcoming stay in Malawi has quite hit me, but as I sit in the Frankfurt airport waiting for a 10 hour flight to Johannesburg, I can’t help but feel some pre-trip jitters of excitement. Since school ended, our internship team has been working at the OEDK to prepare technologies to take to Brazil, Namitete, and Blantyre. From circuit building to laser cutting, the past few weeks have been quite the crash course in engineering. As an Economics major I was a little out of my element at first, but I’m proud to say that I’m now pretty savvy with a soldering iron (see Figure 1). Since there were quite a few technologies to prepare for the trip, we split up the responsibilities. Karen and I were in charge of:

1. IncuBaby – a low cost incubator that aims to prevent neonatal hypothermia

2. AxillaProbe – a low cost binary thermometer for home use in rural areas of Malawi

3. FirstHug – a warming system for neonates that is a shift from the maternal-focused standard of care

4. Respiratory Rate Timers – simple devices to help nurses keep track of a baby’s breaths per minute.

IncuBaby was without a doubt our most challenging prototype to prepare. Despite the extensive instructions that the team left behind, there was a lot of guess and check involved. Using the original version of the device as a blueprint, we soldered, stripped, and wrestled wires into place and ended with an impressive replica. We still have a little troubleshooting to do, but we’re optimistic about our progress. Based on our meeting with the IncuBaby team, we want to get feedback from clinicians and engineers in Malawi about the physical design of the device as well as their suggestions for on how to improve and develop the incubator. A more unexpected issue that we probably should have planned for was the problem of packing an entire incubator for international travel. Since the incubator is made up of interlocking lasercut wood pieces, we planned to take the boards of wood in our baggage and assemble the device in Malawi. However, the biggest pieces were a little too large to fit in normal luggage, which led us to some unconventional packing solutions in the form of boards of wood sandwiched between pieces of cardboard (see Figure 2).

After a month of preparation and packing, we’re definitely ready to see how the innovative technologies we have worked on will perform on the ground. We’re starting to switch gears from building to implementing and I could not be more excited to learn more about the realities and interactions of healthcare, technology, economics, and culture in Malawi!

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Figure 1 – A section of the IncuBaby circuit

 

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Figure 2 – Redefining Checked Baggage

So I guess I’m doing it all over again

Posted on by Emily
The University of Malawi Polytechnic
A view of Blantyre taken from the top of Mt. Soche taken last year
A view of Blantyre taken from the top of Mt. Soche last year

My last blog post from my internship in 2014 was answering the question of whether or not I would consider returning to Blantyre with BTB again. Apparently the post was less of a reflection and more of a prophecy for this coming summer. I am beyond excited to return to Malawi, but I know that this trip will be very different than my two months last year. I look forward to being in the same city, to seeing some of the same people, and to have the chance to brush up on my Chichewa, but I have been working to keep in mind that my work for this year will be a whole new experience of its own.

This year I will be working at the Polytechnic Institute of Malawi, which is a branch of the national University of Malawi. There are around 7,000 students in the University of Malawi spread among five colleges. The Polytechnic houses the business, accounting, architecture, mathematics, communications, and engineering schools, among others. Currently the engineering department offers degrees in mechanical, electrical, and civil engineering, and they are initiating a bioengineering degree program. The Poly is also working with partners at Rice to create a space similar to Rice’s OEDK that would be used for student engineering design projects and classes. The Poly is already collecting design software and mechanical tools that will be necessary for future students’ prototyping. I look forward to getting to be a witness and a participant in that development.

Sarah, Catherine and I have a few specific projects we expect to complete in our eleven weeks. Firstly, we will be working with students and faculty at the Poly on a variety of design projects. Some of them will be continuations of projects started by Rice and Poly students and some are new projects that we have been assigned or will identify while we’re there. We are hoping for all of the projects to be able to source a lot of the materials locally, instead of carrying them from home and therefore making the projects harder to sustain in Malawi. A second task is to develop a sort of engineering O-week, in which incoming students at the Poly can get some exposure to what it means to be an engineer, in all senses of the word. In our preparation, the other interns and myself have brainstormed some ways that would show incoming students how to think like engineers, how to approach a design project, and what different engineering careers can look like around Blantyre. Once we get on site and have some more specifics about our space and the number of students, we will be able to hash out some details. Along with these tasks we will be helping Dr. Saterbak and Dr. Wettergreen with an engineering workshop for the Poly faculty, identifying potential future design projects for Poly and Rice students, and helping the Poly faculty network in any way necessary to prepare the bioengineering curriculum and the engineering design space. 

So yes, I will be in the same city under the same program that I traveled with last year. I feel the same passion for the place, for the goals I’m pursuing, and for the work I’ll be doing as I did a year ago. But the new experience and knowledge I bring to the table, the projects I will work on, and the people I will be collaborating with make this internship an entirely new experience from last year. I’m so excited to be going back to Blantyre, and I hope that the work I do and the connections that I form with the Poly students and faculty can help me become a better engineer, a better ambassador of the Global Health program, and a better world citizen.