Progress update 2/1

Posted by grantem1 on Friday, February 1, 2019 in Uncategorized.

One of our goals for mid-February was to get an oxygen concentrator to build our prototype mechanical device for. In order to reach this goal we have reached out to the administrator at Respiratory Therapy at Vanderbilt and will be communicating with Vanderbilt’s home suppliers to see if they will let us borrow one. However, we are worried that this may be time consuming, and thus further delay our work for this project. Worst case scenario, Dr. Lancaster has said in our meeting this week that  we can come into the clinic at certain times to work with one. We also plan to finish 3D printing parts of our model for this upcoming Wednesday. We have finished scaling our CAD files and have also obtained an Arduino for our project. We plan to purchase all our materials by mid-February as well to eventually begin construction of our mechanical device. Furthermore, we have been continuing to work on our backend design as ou can see below.

Since we acquired an Arduino UNO and have access to the Arduino IDE, we have begun coding the motor functions based on an incoming “message” from the application.  We will be trying to temporarily acquire a motor from the electronics lab in the Wondr’y in order to test the Arduino.

 

After meeting with Dr. Lancaster this past week she has informed us that our protocol for adjusting the oxygen liter flow will only be dependent on one parameter, the patient’s blood oxygen liter saturation value. She hopes to complete this protocol and clinically test it for us by the end of the Month.

In terms of materials we need to purchase a pulse oximeter by mid-february in addition to a motor, connection wires, battery source,voltmeter and soldering iron. We will  be focusing our backend design for the concentrator we hope to acquire very soon and then implement a feature in our app to so the patient can select the oxygen concentrator they are using which will require us to expand our code to various oxygen concentrator models.

 

The biggest challenges we have faced are the delay in getting an oxygen concentrator and our inability to find a time to visit an IPF patient and actually see how an oxygen concentrator is used in homes to modify our needs assessment based on our observations. Dr.Lancaster has also introduced the idea of thinking about how the tubing for patients can be troublesome for patients, though this is not a part of our project, but by going into patients homes it would allow us to better brainstorm ideas for her.