At the end of last month, we had to say goodbye to everyone and to Malawi as the internship had come to an end. It was hard to believe that it was over while having farewell dinner with the team on our last Saturday there.
Little time paired with a lot to do for the group projects made the last few days of the internship quite intense. After making some changes to the electronic components as well as the envisioned mechanical user interface from our compression therapy device project (see my previous posts for more info), we converted the circuitry developed on a few breadboards into two manual prototyping printed circuit boards (PCBs) and finalized it. Soldering all of this was a challenging process due to the space limitations, the narrow room for maneuvering as well as the need for debugging and redoing several things. We also designed and 3D printed a new box to house all of the electronics, and placed the PCBs as well as other separate electronic components inside it. While we did not incorporate the leg cuffs into this prototype, we did explore a couple of different manufacturing techniques with a local fabric, which if developed and proven successful, could help in our efforts to make a device that can be manufactured as locally as possible. Due to the tight timeline and new debugging challenges to overcome, we did not obtain all of the functionality that we had desired and which was already reflected in the user interface of the prototype. However, we did develop and implement all of the hardware components and had working PCBs which provided key functionalities to the device.
Overall, in building the existing open source device in Malawi, we adapted the design mostly due to limitations in the available materials as well as developments to the device which we wanted to incorporate. Of course, work still has to be done to finish as well as to optimize the device, but going through the process allowed us to explore the challenges and possibilities of making a device in Malawi and to learn from it.
This is what the prototype of the box looked like:
Lastly, the Friday before leaving, we had presentations on both our group projects as well as smaller needs-finding based personal projects. Ranken and I presented about our compression therapy device after Sanjay and Tatyana had talked about their project. Then, we all talked about our personal ones, with the topics discussed relating to maternal and neonatal health as well as prosthetics and orthotics. These research topics might become future projects for other teams, so stay tuned 🙂
Looking back, with the work done and experiences had during these two months, I have been able to develop practical engineering skills, learnt to use what is available to me and work around what is not, and gotten a better understanding of the needs and design requirements of a setting like Malawi. One does not have to go very far to find needs there and while not everything is an engineering problem, one of my biggest takeaways from this experience was seeing the direct positive impact that bioengineering can make in a setting where the resources are low but the needs are high. It is thus great to know that there are people at Rice working on developing global health technologies to help tackle medical needs in low resource settings.
I want to thank everyone who helped to make this internship possible.
Goodbye, Paula 🙂
