📚Summary

<aside> 🗒️ Taking part in the IMPACT initiative, my team and I worked with Tiffany, who was our client for this year's project. We designed a device that can her help in her daily living and improve their quality of life. Tiffany suffers from a birth defect named spina bifida.

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[1] Picture of our client Tiffany

Overview

The client Tiffany has spina bifida paralyzing her from the waist down. This comes with many challenges, one being able to grab and reach objects or open doors due to her limited mobility and dexterity. She has one completely functional arm so her difficulty with reaching and grabbing things impedes her day-to-day life and her quality of living. Thus, there is a need to design an innovative solution so that she can live a fulfilling life.

[2] Picture of Tiffany

We chose to make her a gripper. Our team was free to concentrate on any issue and utilize our creativity to come up with a design solution because there were no design specifications provided. As a result, we prepared a list of objectives and constraints for our design:

Design Objectives

• The device should be affordable
• The mechanism should be easily portable, so Tiffany is able to take it with her wherever she goes.
• The device should be able to endure daily use
• The device should be safe to her and the people around her
• The device should be easy to use and work for grabbing a large variety of objects

Constraints

• Tiffany cannot use her left hand with the same dexterity as her right, so the mechanism should be designed to be used with just one hand.
• The gripper cannot weigh more than 2 pounds

📏Design Process

🔬Preliminary Research

I was tasked with researching about our client’s condition. As I mentioned prior, Tiffany has a medical condition called spina bifida. I discovered that spina bifida patients navigate their surroundings in unique ways. These include walking without assistance, walking with braces, crutches, or walkers, and using wheelchairs. I also started analyzing her old gripper to see where we can improve on our design to not only achieve the general objective but to also build a design that is an improvement compared to her current gripper.