Iteration 3: Close Phase

The final outcome of our project was a refined, fully functioning prototype. We produced a brace that detects limping and in turn notifies the wearer when it is detected. This information is then transferred to Google Sheets where it is visualized into a graph and color coordinated for Physical Therapists to monitor. Secondarily, the same data is transferred to an SD card for backup data storage. The exterior is beautified by encapsulating wires within tubing and other components within compartments.

Lessons Learned

During this process, we learned a lot about working with a sponsor, hardware difficulties, and troubleshooting code.

When working with a sponsor, it was important for our group to clearly communicate and provide constant updates on our progress. We learned how to concisely reframe our most recent developments in non technical terms. We also learned how to ask relevant questions that would help guide our next week of development.

When running into hardware difficulties, it was important for our group to test the various components of our system. We learned how to test our soldering job by tugging on the wires, we learned how to test for power using a multimeter on various components, and we learned how to reset our components when they weren’t working as we thought.

When running into software difficulties, it was important for our group to continuously check our logic. We learned how to find errors by walking through line by line and we learned how to see what is happening within the code with print statements.

Success Criteria

We defined our success criteria in the Envision Phase to be the following:

Criteria for Meeting Our Vision: To produce a working MVP that holds patients accountable for their walking habits outside of the physical therapist’s office. From there, ensuring that our solution is in working condition for further professional development with our sponsors or other medical device organization.

How Will We Measure Success: To produce our MVP in such a way that it creates a unique and meaningful interaction for knee patients. A pitch-able device with working components and outputs in real-life settings. We want 1 in 10 users to switch to our brace during their recovery process to aid in their walking.

We met our criteria for our vision by successfully producing our MVP while going further to incorporate data for the Physical Therapists’ use. We also were able to develop the brace out enough to get in contact with Breg to potentially pitch our idea to their engineers. So, we were able to create a pitch-able device with working components and outputs into real-life settings.

Future plans

We plan to do some more research about possible interfering patents and prepare a presentation for Breg.