Skills Developed:

<aside> ✅ Raspberry Pi: Sensor and Output Device skills

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<aside> ✅ Fluency in Custom-Tkinter Python Library

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<aside> ✅ Front-End / Graphical User Interface Development

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<aside> ✅ Autonomous Device Ideation and Creation

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<aside> ✅ Problem Identification within Specific Demographics

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<aside> ✅ Administrative Skills

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Overview:

DP-3 was our first taste of independence in the Integrated Biomedical Engineering and Health Sciences program. Our job was quite simple: identify an accessibility problem within a chosen demographic, and create a device that detects sensor input and produces a mechanical output.

Our Solution:

Meet PillPal, an automatic pill dispenser. PillPal uses a Time-Of-Flight VL530X distance sensor and a Servo motor to detect and eject pills. Our goal with PillPal is to aid individuals who work in health care, optimize hospitals, and help individuals with memory loss, or fine motor skills.

Final functional medium-fidelity prototype of PillPal

Design Process:

• Administrative Responsibilities

Preliminary Idea Generation:

Like all projects, when given a problem your initial step is to diverge, creating a set of possible solutions, and then diverge on the most viable or effective solution for the defined problem. This project was a little bit different, though. Rather than being given a problem, our job was to choose a certain demographic and then identify and select a challenge they might face.

We had considered many demographics: the elderly, the young, the visually impaired, those in the healthcare field, and those with epilepsy. After bouncing around ideas of heartbeat sensors, medication administrators, and automatic adjusting glasses, we agreed that we could create the most impact by helping those within the healthcare field. Much of our research signified that they (nurses in particular) were constantly pressed for time.

From this demographic, we generated a few ideas and preliminary sketches:

Preliminary sketch of a hospital transportation device

Preliminary sketch for the pill dispenser

We converged on two ideas, and used a “Pugh matrix” to converge on the best idea:

Pugh matrix DP3.pdf