1st Semester: Fall 2016
Weekly Report |
Journal Logs |
Week 1
Date: 10 September 2016 Report Content: Group Name: MakeBMEGreatAgain Group Members: Shirshak Aryal, Nischal Khanal and Utsav Malla Logistics Report: We formed our group on Monday, 5th September 2016 and decided to name it “MakeBMEGreatAgain”. We are still approaching different people on the client’s list in order to finalize our client. However, it appears that most of the client we approached have already accepted other team. Although we had few technical difficulties initially, as of today, all three of us have successfully connected to Scinote. Project Report: We have a general sense of idea what our product is going to be. Since all of us have a connection with Nepal, we decided to focus on an issue that is pertinent to the rural Nepali population, where hand burns due to cooking fire is common. These burn victims undergo burn surgery, but cannot afford the physiotherapy required post surgery. This lack of proper physiotherapy can cause scar tissue formation and leads to contraction. This leaves the burn victim handicapped unable to use their hands for day-to-day activity. So we are planning on designing an orthotic splint that could act as in home rehabilitation for these burn patients. We have worked on a similar product before, but we want to design a newer more advanced version of the splint with extra features. |
Didn't write journal logs for this week, as we were still experiencing some technical difficulties associated with SciNote.
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Week 2
Date: 17 September 2016 Report Content: We have decided upon a basic overview for our project. We plan on working with clients from Stanford University. Utsav worked with a team of engineers, medical students and PHD students over the summer on a product design project for an orthotic splint and we plan on innovation that for our senior design project. He will be contacting the clients today to see if they are willing to support us, which they most likely will. Utsav’s supervisors already want to expand their product and come up with newer and better designs for the splint, and he has already got an okay from them on working on a similar project for this class. We will not be using the same design of course, but rebuilding it from the ground up by going through the entirety of the design process, and come up with a completely newer version of the splint that’s more efficient, uses a different functional mechanism, and hopefully even cheaper than the previous model. We have also decided on a bi-weekly meeting time to kick start brainstorming ideas for the new design, and should have a few low-resolution sketches ready within the next few weeks. |
Week 3
Date: 23 September 2016 Report Content: Group: MakeBMEGreatAgain Members: Shirshak Aryal, Nischal Khanal, Utsav Malla Project Update: We were finally able to get into contact with our client, the start-up “Hand Hero.” Our contact person will be Kimberly Souza, a medical student at Stanford and a co-founder of Hand Hero. They have agreed to support us throughout this project and aid us as needed through the design and development phases. With their support, we have made a finalized decision on our project scope. As we stated in the Project Scope report, we will attempt to make a rehabilitative orthotic splint for patients who undergo surgery for hand burns caused by cooking fires. Our goals will be to keep the device inexpensive and ensure that it can be easily manufactured and used while maintain its effectiveness. We believe that one of the hardest challenges will be trying to find the balance between cost, ease of use and effectiveness; we hope our clients will aid us through this process. We have not discussed any design ideas about the device yet and we hope to start on and progress through the design process throughout the upcoming weeks. Attached is our journal entries for this week. |
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Week 4
Date: 30 September 2016 Report Content: We met on Sunday this week for an hour. The main focus of this week’s group was to come up with independent design feature ideas. All three team members came up with design sketches for the splint. We collaborated together to analyze and evaluate what were the features in each of our sketch that might work, and what are the features that needs alteration. So far, the design sketches have been a low resolution one and we have a lot of things we have to figure out until we can come up with a high resolution sketch. However, it was a good start for in terms of coming out with a general outline of what our actual final product might look like, and to ensure all of us are on the same page. This week we are meeting on Sunday for couple of hours to work on more design feature ideas, and hopefully come up with a slightly higher resolution sketch. |
Week 5
Date: 7 October 2016 Report Content: This week we had multiple meetings in order to finish up the preliminary report for our project. We met on Sunday from 3 to 6 to discuss what we were going to include in our report. Since we do not have a CAD design yet, we could not include that in our report. However, we did include the general outline of what the design metrics is going to be. We also discussed a lot about the socio-economic background of the problem that we are trying to tackle. After our meeting on Sunday, we divided the weekly report amongst the three of us and each one was assigned a certain section of the paper. We then met again on Thursday to collaborate the three sections of the paper and finalize our preliminary report. |
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Week 6
Date: 14 October 2016 Report Content: We completed the first major milestone of our project this week: Preliminary Presentation. Based on our preliminary report, which was written last week, we prepared our first presentation for the public. Utsav Malla presented for our group on Wednesday, 12 October 2016 at 9:30 am in Whitaker Auditorium. A day prior toour presentation, Utsav did several run through of the presentation while rest of our group members listened to him on Google hangouts, we made few changes during those session based on mutual agreement. Overall the presentation was a great success. Upcoming scheduled tasks/meeting: Website Design Meeting: • Date: 16 October, 2016 • Venue: Lopata Gallery • Tentative Duration: 4 pm to 10 pm. |
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Week 7
Date: 21 October 2016 Report Content: Due to fall break, our group was unable to meet during the beginning of this week. However, we collaborated via Google and Facebook to begin producing the webpage for our product. Nischal oversees the maintenance of the webpage, so he did most of the work in terms of setting up the page via Weebly. Shirshak and Utsav provided input for some of the content for the webpage. Each team member is responsible to filling out their bio section on the webpage. Nischal will ensure that the weekly reports and any presentation get uploaded. He will also fill out the various other content such as project scope, client overview and any project updates as the design process progresses. The responsibilities of the other two members will be to aid him in putting together the content. The group plans on meeting either this weekend or at the beginning of next week to further discuss the project. |
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Week 8
Date: 28 October 2016 Report Content: This week we met on Sunday Evening for a few hours and worked on our group website mostly. All of the team members contributed to all the variables to discuss and figure out a general outline of what our website is going to look like. Nischal had the major responsibility of translating all of our website design feature ideas into actual material since he has had webpage design experience. All the team members agreed on coming up with more ideas for a more interactive website design, so that the viewers are more intrigued by our product. Our website is handrehabilitationsplint.weebly.com. |
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Week 9
Date: 4 November 2016 Report Content: Upon reading through Dr Klasnear’s email, we all agreed that substantial improvement was necessary pertaining to use of design notebook and our project in general. Our group seemed to be a bit more lax about approaching this whole class and scheduling conflicts were also becoming an issue. Thus, we decided that more effort was needed from all the group members to get our project back up to the standard. Group met on two different occasions this week, however Utsav was not able to make it to one of the meeting due to unfortunate events. We came up with different strategies and immediate goals to improve the pace of our project. Below is the summary of our conclusion from those meetings. Website Update: Our website is now up to date with all the weekly report, journals and individual bio’s. Thus, we met our first goal of getting our website updated with most recent information. From now on, information on important progress will be updated on the regular basis. Tab for Weekly Report Upload in SciNote: A new tab was created in the design notebook, which is not linked to the main workflow. This tab will be used to upload the electronic copy of weekly report on a regular basis. As of now, all the previous weekly report has already uploaded in this section of SciNote. Weekly Meetings: We will now meet 2-3 times a week. First meeting would be every Wednesday at 6pm in Whitaker. Second meeting would be during any lab hours assigned. Third meeting would be a virtual meeting on Google hangout every Sunday, where each member would summarize/discuss their work in the previous week. Previously, we only met once a week, either in person or virtually. Modifications to Preliminary Report: Our group also decided that we will work to improve our original preliminary report by changing the content according to the feedback we received from Dr Klaesner. Specifically, we will perform more literature review, patient review and search for more alternative existing solution. We will also work towards including more figures and tables in our report. Approach on Design Notebook: From now on, every small task/ event pertaining to our project will be recorded in our notebook. If a group member performs a task outside of the meetings/lab time, he is responsible to individually report it on the notebook immediately. So everyone should be reporting his work on the regular. However, team member writing report for a particular week will also be accountable to compile, generate and upload the journal for that week. |
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Week 10
Date: 10 November 2016 Report Content: This week we met with Dr. Klaesner on Monday after class to discuss the shortcomings in our preliminary report and how to improve our project for the remainder of the semester. The main critique that we got from Dr. Klaesner was on our lack of information on our project scope and design specs. Hence, we met on Tuesday to discuss the necessary steps to take forward in order to improve on those areas. As a start, Utsav came up with multiple sketches of design ideas which included information of the design specs and the dimension of our prototype. The design sketches along with the dimension has been updated on the scinote. Since were also lacking on literature resources, Shirshak was assigned to come up with multiple articles pertinent to burn patients and scar tissue contracture rehabilitation. Shirshak came up with eight different literature articles that was relevant to our project and each member of the team was assigned the responsibility to read 3 articles each to extract relevant information for the upcoming progress report. We also had a google hang out meeting on Wednesday evening to discuss on the progress each individual member of the team has been making, and came up with hard deadlines for each task assigned. The next step in our agenda is to review the design ideas and turn our low resolution sketches into a higher definition sketches and form the foundation to start building our first prototype model. |
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Week 11
Date: 18 November 2016 Report Content: Our group met with Dr. Klaesner to discuss the shortcomings of our preliminary report and our work on the project overall. Our group was too focused on one solution for the issue we were considering and thus, failing to realize and explore the scope of possible solutions. Furthermore, our current solution was not unique enough to merit a full design process. Thus, this week our group has been rigorously researching alternate solutions to our issue and using these ideas to generate our own, unique solutions to the issue. Some of these solutions have included message therapy and gel immersion. We plan to meet as a group for an extended period on Saturday to discuss these ideas in person and generate three or four unique solutions and explore their pros and cons. From there, we will continue to explore other possibilities for our progress report. This report was turned in late due to a miscommunication in the group regarding who was responsible for the report this week and will not happen in the future. |
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Week 12 & 13 (combined)
Date: 2 December 2016 Report Content: We finally completed our Progress report, which is one of the important milestones of our class and project. We met at least three times a weeks in past few weeks, and almost everyday during thanksgiving break except for Thursday. We researched and came up with new solution ideas on daily (almost) basis, and discussed the feasibility of that idea in terms of our project for every new solution ideas. Based on useful features of existing solutions, we started writing down design alternative solutions regularly. We also met with Dr Klasnear twice every week to go through/ discuss on written drafts of our design alternatives, specification table and updated need and project scope. Several modifications were made based on his suggestion and our group agreements. We also communicated with our client for further recommendations. For every new literature that was researched and each written content in progress report, we uploaded that information in Scinote on regular basis. Summary of Progress Report: First section was for revised need statement and project scope. The table for design specifications was also constructed. Next, we categorized design alternatives into three categories based on our design specification table, those categories were: 1) Contact Media 2) Hand Enclosure Device 3) Material. We explored 5-7 design alternatives for each category. Pugh chart was created to compare design alternatives within each category. Solutions with best and second best scores were determined for every category, and were considered for our proposed solution. We determined that the most effective hand enclosure device would be a hybrid between the elastic glove and the exoskeleton splint, where elastic glove portion will be made primarily from Spandex and component of exoskeleton splint will be 3D printed using ABS. The interface between skin and elastic glove will be lined with a contact media (hypofix, cotton or silicon gel). Finally, the requested budget breakdown was done in a tabular form. However, some aspects of proposed solutions are tentative and are subject to change as we progress into prototyping phase. |
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2nd Semester: Spring 2017
Week 1
Date: 27 January 2017 Report Content: Our group met briefly to discuss the TechShop Membership. We will meet again next week in order to develop a work plan for the semester and begin utilizing the TechShop resources. |
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Week 2
Date: 3 February 2017 Report Content: Having completed the progress report last semester, we have a clear idea of what our final product is going to be. We have acquired the tech shop license. We intend on visiting the tech shop this Sunday. We are also coming up with some low resolution sketches, and ultimately start building prototypes and CAD drawings. |
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Week 3
Date: 10 February 2017 Report Content: Currently, all of our group members are researching on reliable suppliers (online) to buy our needed raw materials. We have our own deadline to come up with a list by this Sunday. In the meanwhile, we are also working towards making hand sketches of our product, our target is to have it made by this Sunday. On different note, TechShop might not be that much of feasible option as our regular workplace because it would cost $50 per visit (to just accompany Nischal). Details about it is in the Journal. Thus, we are working on finding solution this problem. Finally, we have started/will be meeting three days a week (Sunday, Wednesday and Friday) to work on our project throughout this semester. |
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Week 4
Date: 17 February 2017 Report Content: This was a productive week in terms of finalizing our exoskeleton drawing. The next step is to finalize the complete 3-D CAD model. Along with the exoskeleton, the design and material of elastic gloving material is also on the verge of completion. |
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Week 5
Date: 24 February 2017 Report Content: We only met as a group once this weekend due to busy schedules but will dedicate the weekend for progress update. We continued the CAD modeling separately. The group will compile the V&V report this weekend based on early CAD modeling and prototyping. We also plan on 3D printing the exoskeleton for testing. |
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Week 6
Date: 3 March 2017 Report Content: Currently, this project is in prototyping phase. Our simplest prototype for exoskeleton is almost complete at this point. Likewise, we have also finalized the materials to be purchased and have also identified the right products and suppliers. We are expecting the required materials to arrive before spring break, March 10 2017. |
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Week 7
Date: 10 March 2017 Report Content: This week we completed our Verification and Validation Report and Presentation. Nischal gave the presentation on March 8 in class. We also had a google hangout session to discuss ordering the spandex material. The next step involves tailoring the glove according to our design and integrating it with the hypafix and exoskeleton. |
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Week 8
(A week off for Spring break!!) Date: 24 March 2017 Report Content: Currently, we are working on making adjustable knob mechanism for exoskeleton. We want to get exoskeleton part with locking knob mechanism build by 31st of March. For glove making, Nischal is taking sewing class in techshop between 30th May to 1st of April. Upon completion, gloves will be make by 8th April 2017. This will give us about 2 weeks to perform various tests on our prototype. All the necessary raw items will arrive today. |
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Week 9
Date: 31 March 2017 Report Content: This week our group focused on developing a plan for the tension adjustment knob and on improving the initial design of the exoskeletal splint. In addition, we met with Dr. Klaesner to discuss how to measure the pressure applied by the elastic glove. Next week, we plan on finishing the splint (and incorporating the tension adjustment knob). Once that is complete, we will work on the elastic glove. |
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Week 10
Date: 7 April 2017 Report Content: This week we mainly focused on the design for the ratchet mechanism for our exoskeleton. We had multiple different ideas for the design and ended up drafting CAD files for these various design. (The images of CAD files has been uploaded in sci-note) Although we had some issues with printing with few of our ideas, we were able to print an adjustable knob. Nischal attended the 3-D printing class this week. We are going to try printing our ratchet in the tech shop too because they have a better resolution. |
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Week 11
Date: 14 April 2017 Report Content: We are currently in the final stage of our project. Tomorrow, we will be sewing gloves in Tech Shop and also print final version of exoskeleton, along with adjustable knob/locking mechanism. On Sunday, our entire device will be assembled and will be ready for combined unit testing. In the meantime, we are working towards completing Design Safe, which will be uploaded in the Scinote upon completion. From 17th to 21st of April most of the time will be spent on performing various verification and validation tests on the product, and also writing our final report due on 21st April 2017. |
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Week 12
Date: 21 April 2017 Report Content: We finished making our final prototype as of today. We also completed our final report for the project which was due today. Most of the verification and validation test worked. And more importantly, our product was also able to provide static progressive functionality, while having a very reasonable production cost of $17.26 per product. Going forward, we will update all the videos and images of the verification and validation tests of our prototype, and final presentation power point in the website. Our group is planning to meet on Sunday to prepare for the presentation. |
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