On Friday of the last week we met with our client to update him on our status at the end of the first semester. Following Professor Yin’s advice we confirmed with our client what information exactly the client wants to deliver to the patients. Rather than having a binary feedback response based on whether or not the patient meets the feedback threshold, the client wants the feedback to increase linearly as the patient’s movements increase towards threshold. We will proceed with this in mind as we move to prototyping.This week, we met on Sunday to discuss what our plan for designing our first prototype will be. This first concept is to look to test the minimal design needs. We will utilize two accelerometers to obtain one joint angle and determine how effective this system is. We plan to get 3-axis Adafruit accelerometers from Amazon.
After meeting with Dr. Yin and our client last week, we updated our specs on Tuesday. Our specs are more quantitative, and we have a clearer understanding of how we can test whether our prototype has met the design needs in preparation for the Validation and Verification report. This Friday, we will begin our first building phase in Professor Widder’s lab. We plan to use wires and Arduino that Professor Widder has in the lab and the accelerometers should have arrived by then. Olivia who ordered the accelerometers will submit a reimbursement form to Professor Klaesner by the end of the week.
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Over the past weekend, Olivia shadowed Dr. Carter at The Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis, gaining insight from seeing a range of patients with varied motor function. We’ll further consider her observations as we move forward with our project. We will meet with Dr. Carter this Friday at 4pm for a formal update on our project since we last met with him in November.
This week, we Skyped Dr. Yin for guidance in the next step of the process. On our progress report, he stated many concerns about our specifications and analysis. After talking with him, we are planning on revamping our specifications by creating more quantitative “hard” metrics in order to make the process of validation and verification better. After we adjust our specifications, we will start the first phase of building the prototype -- buying the parts. Though, Dr. Yin expressed concern about the use of the FLORA microprocessor by Adafruit which would take in the voltage input and interface with the computer. It is unclear whether or not the FLORA can interface with 9 accelerometers at once as our design requires. If things do not go well with the FLORA, we plan to use an Arduino that Chris has in order to test our product. Since both are compatible with Arduino software, it should not take much extra work to test out both microprocessors to determine which one best suits our needs. During and after Thanksgiving break, our group prepared our Progress report with the guidance of our client, along with Professors Yin and Klaesner. After completing our Progress Report and turning it in December 1, Galen prepared to give the presentation on the following Wednesday, and we met as a group twice to help him rehearse. We are going to send our client Dr. Carter our report and presentation, and are currently in the process of scheduling another meeting with him. We hope to meet with him once more before break to update him on the status of our presentation and confirm the direction we are headed in for next semester. We are still waiting on getting a long-term patient for observation and hope to have one ready by the start of next semester.
We are currently writing and finalizing the Progress Report. We met with Dr. Klaesner earlier in the week to get his thoughts on specifications. Through talking with him we have a better idea on aspects of design like analog to digital, and processing speed. We were also very unclear on how to proceed with the feedback part of our design, but after taking Dr. Klaesner’s advice we focussed primarily on literature research to guide our feedback designs. Over Thanksgiving break, we conference called Dr. Becnel, the professor for Sensors and Actuators. Overall the meeting was not too helpful as we found it difficult to convey the scope of our project and all the necessary background over a call, but we may continue to ask him for guidance in second semester during the build phase as he was extremely generous and offered his continued guidance. We have also met with Dr. Yin to clarify some of the design specifications. We are currently still waiting for Dr. Carter to find a patient we can meet with regularly to discuss the project with. Galen is going to give the next presentation, and we will be helping him prepare as a group over the weekend and early next week.
This week we met three times over Skype given that we were each in a different city for the Thanksgiving holiday. During our first meeting on Monday night, we shared individual research updates for design specs and identified some key metrics. We connected with Professor Yin on Tuesday night over Skype to update him on how we’ve broken down our device’s design needs (by sensor, interface, data processing, and feedback output) and to use his feedback to help set the direction of our work for the rest of our holiday break. Today, Friday November 24th we will meet with Sensors and Actuators professor Bob Becnel to get his expert input on the technical design specs we’ve laid out as well. After the conclusion of that meeting, the team will formally conduct our analysis of our Pugh Charts and begin writing our paper in parallel.
This week we had our weekly group meeting on Monday evening and further discussed our design specifications and where to proceed with our research. We discussed what we still need to ask Dr. Carter to clarify for us before the next report is due and decided to set up a meeting with Professor Klaesner. We met with Professor Klaesner during team time on Wednesday to look for some more direction in our project going forward. We realized through this conversation that for our Pugh charts we need to decompose our initial specifications much further so they will be in a form that can be used to compare different designs. We then had a group Skype that same night to come up with these new specifications and started our Pugh Charts. We then broke up the different designs and assigned each member a portion to research and fill out the Pugh chart for. We are now looking for other professors to provide some guidance in areas we are unfamiliar such as how to evaluate different softwares for our device. We are still waiting to hear back from Dr. Carter on our patient and are also in the process of creating a weighted glove to test our weight specification. We are currently continuing to research in order to complete our design analysis.
This week we met with our client Dr. Carter and discussed our design specifications and updated him on our progress. Based on our concerns about the limitations of only visiting The Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis to engage with our targeted end users, Dr. Carter will provide us the opportunity to work with a representative patient biweekly throughout the design process. This way we can get extremely valuable insight directly from the patient’s perspective. Dr. Carter will work on finding a suitable patient on his end, and hopefully let us know soon. We talked about specifications such as engagement and how to measure it. We went over our other specifications as well and tried to more sharply quantify our specifications to move forward with. We will be beginning the process of writing the Progress report, and are planning to meet with Dr. Yin to run through our updated design specifications. With these new design specifications, we can conduct a better evaluation of the potential solutions we brainstormed in another meeting using a Pugh Chart. We are now planning to move into the research and designing phase, while finishing our specs concurrently. Since this is the bulk of the next report, we want to get an early start. As a group, we divided up our tasks and research to finish by next week. We are still waiting to hear back from our therapist contacts on their opinions and suggestions on specifications.
Early this week on Monday we met as a group and worked on brainstorming some possible designs for the upcoming progress report. We made an extensive list of some of the different technologies available to us and the types of feedback we want to incorporate into our device. We also discussed our grade on the preliminary report and how we can improve. On Wednesday night we Skyped as a group with Professor Yin to discuss the design generation process. He recommended first nailing down our design specifications as finely as possible, which we will be doing next Tuesday when we meet again. His advice on the designs was to divide our device into several components such as sensor, sensor holder, feedback, and data processing, and then evaluate each category individually, find the best from each, and then combine them into our best design. Friday morning we will be observing a therapy session for a stroke patient and will hopefully get a better idea on how we can best serve our target patients and possibly get inspiration for some designs. We are also looking to schedule another meeting with our client next week to update Dr. Carter on our current progress.
Our group is planning to start the brainstorming phase, in addition to seeking out mentors for our design project. We have contacted Todd Sproull, the professor for mobile app development, who mentioned that he would be able to help only for the remainder of the Fall 2017 semester. His help however might contain consulting fees, so we are unsure if we want to take on unnecessary spending so early on in our project. We plan to contact other mentors that will allow for hardware and software interfacing who hopefully will not require additional fees. We are currently scheduling a time to meet up with physical therapists to observe the sessions in order to understand the problems better. We have developed our preliminary website to make information about our project such as the background, design specifications, contact information, and weekly reports public. We picked up our graded report this past Wednesday and have been brainstorming on how to make corrections based on the grader comments so we can improve for the next report.
We have just finished presenting our project to the class and submitting our preliminary report last week. With the feedback from the presentation and the feedback we get from the report whenever that is, we will work to further sharpen our specifications and improve the current state of the project. Currently, we received contact information for Janelle, a colleague and friend of Dr. Carter’s who works in The Rehabilitation Institute of St. Louis. We plan contact Janelle soon to schedule a time to examine the rehabilitation clinic to reach a more thorough understanding of the needs of our device’s target population. This step will be essential in coming up with our designs in the next phase of our project and will allow us to create these designs with the specific needs of the target patients in mind. We are currently working with our client to clear HIPAA certification and clear any logistical barriers to the therapy observation, although the client believes it will be fairly simple to make this happen. We are also planning on meeting as a team the following Tuesday on 10/17/17 to discuss further directions. The website will also be worked on in time for the deadline of 10/19/17. We plan on continuing to research possible technologies we can utilize as well as research to further strengthen our comprehension of the project.
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AuthorJust your average engineering students -- solving problems yet to be solved Archives
April 2018
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