Valor Tech

Progress Report #9

Working with John Fellenstein at Vanderbilt Stevenson Machine Shop, we have designed a 9” X 9” X 6” encasing for the hysteroscopy simulator. The screen will be mounted on the front and the model uterus and arduino will be affixed to a specialized blue acrylic bottom panel. The top of the casing will either be open or have a hinge that will allow for easy servicing of the model uterus. In terms of design day, we will bring both the completed model and an iPad to display videos of real surgeries. Our hope is to create a fully immersive experience for our design day judges so that they can directly understand the benefits of our approach.

In parallel, we have contacted OB/GYN experts at the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health. Dr. Doug Heimburger, an expert in clinical nutrition for low-resource settings referred us to Vanderbilt physicians Dr. John Tarpley, Dr. Melinda New, and Dr. Khabele. Through these experts we have recently contacted Dr. Lindsey Evans, a Global Health OB/GYN Fellow in Guyana. We will present our model to these experts, incorporate their feedback, obtain quotes/opinions that we can share with the judges on design day. Our hope is to use these key opinion leaders as a demonstration of efficacy of our design.
Finally, we are continuing and finishing our work on the model hardware; in particular, we are coding a simple user interface for the screen, integrating a memory card in order to save data, creating an output methodology for the arduino, and finishing the integration of the directional and pressure sensitive linear potentiometer.