Week 9 Recap- Putting it all together

This week was really cool because we were able to put our projects together that we have been working on the past couple weeks in the FabLab.

Physical Therapy Watch

The physical therapy watch that we have been working on the last couple of weeks is intended to patients correctly measure the effectiveness of their exercises. Utilizing tilt sensors and adjustable curl and twist settings this watch allows outpatients to better understand if they are correctly maximizing their workouts.

To begin we had to come to class with our laser cut watch face so we wouldn’t have to wast class time printing everybody’s out. This turned out to be incredibly beneficial because we were very pressed for time. When we arrived we were handed the remaining pieces of our watch along with come kits so we can integrate the sensor technology into our designs of our watch.

These kits were our biggest learning experience of the day because they helped us learn how to run code to our circuit boards to teach them different operations. To help operate the program we utilized a program named Arduino to input our designated codes into the circuits. It was really awesome to see that we were able to completely put together the entire product all the way down to the code telling the board what to do. This was the number one reason a lot of us joined this class and I believe to be the biggest value. We are learning ways to interact with technology to make things to better our society. The purpose of our code was to connect the board with the sensors to communicate when to register a correct movement or not, whether that be a curl or twist. With a combination of our watch face to help tell the users if they were work a twist or curl the code worked great.

After the coding of our circuit board was completed we put everything together using the components they gave us at the beginning of class. We continued to follow the steps of putting the watch together that I found really cool. The main purpose was to use our minds and our hands to make products. I thought it was really cool to work with our entire class to work and I really felt like I was becoming much more open-minded with my thought process. I had never really put together anything like this before and I found a lot of goof lessons in the process of learing how to build something form scratch.

Storyboarding

After we completed the work on our watch, we began the work on storyboard for our own projects. The objective of this exercise was to help groups visualize the process of our products being used. It gave all of our groups the opportunity to understand our products life cycle. It was nice to collaborate between our groups to create a better long term plan in our products life cycle. This was also great to better understand the end goal and our products perception by our users. By understanding our products end goal we can better understand how to make the best decisions in the beginning stages of the product. By talking and reading other groups conversations I think many people found this exercise very beneficial. I linked some helpful photo below that our groups shared to best dive into the storyboards.

Next steps moving forward I think our class needs to start preparing for our upcoming Make-a-thon. We are meeting on Tuesday to further understand the purpose of our projects and hear more about the Make-a-thon. I think that these next few weeks coming off of spring break are going to be really great for our projects. We have spent a lot of time theorizing and understanding our projects scope and now with time expiring on the semester its time for more advanced prototyping. Im excited for my group and to see the amazing ideas of other groups come to life!