There were several projects for students available for us to pick from for Hackcessible this year, and with a team of 5 from various universities around the UK we couldn’t wait to develop something that would be applicable to a real-life situation. For our student engineering project, we decided to focus on tackling the big issue of nerve damage. Difficult to treat and even more difficult to perfect our student project for, we were happy to take on the challenge!
Millions of people experience nerve damage a year and recovery is a particularly arduous and lengthy process. Unlike many other injuries, even relatively small areas of nerve damage can have a significant impact on an individual’s ability to enjoy their day-to-day life. Nerve damage is also a particularly expensive injury to both treat and live with, as it often results in a loss of mobility and feeling and therefore ability to work. In more severe situations, nerve damage can even result in a loss of independence, especially in older adults. This can be responsible for significant costs to both the NHS, in the form of treatment and the government, in the form of disability benefits. This is where Hackcessible and our student project came in.
Currently, there’s no perfect treatment for nerve damage. Most treatment involves long periods of attempting to stimulate nerves by following repetitive exercises, but these carry with them the risk of damaging the nerves further and thereby aggravating the problem and setting patients further back on their already considerable road to recovery. As far as projects for engineering students go, we’ve picked an area that definitely needs more research and attention.
[1] [2]
It’s difficult to see the extent of a problem from a bunch of faceless statistics, so for this article, we’re zooming in on the particular individual that we kept in mind throughout Hackcessible as we developed our engineering project.
Meet Pauline
After a particularly nasty fall, Pauline soon discovered that she had sustained a brachial plexus injury. (That’s an injury to the bunch of nerves that carry signals from the spinal cord to the arm and hands!) As a result, she found herself unable to extend her left hand at her wrist- as well as experiencing complete numbness throughout the hand and fingers. This was a dangerous situation to be in as Pauline, as without pain, she couldn’t tell which positions she could leave her hand in and which were causing her further damage. Pauline needed a mechanical engineering project that was adapted to her specific injury and could help her exercise her hand safely as she recovered.
Our Student Project
As we got started, it became clear to us that with the amount of time we had to design, develop and build a complete engineering project solution just wasn’t viable. Instead, in the true spirit of projects for students, we decided to focus on altering and redesigning that which already existed to fit our purpose.
By adapting mechanical hands already designed to help assist amputees with basic gripping movements, our student project focused on the design and production of a nerve rehabilitation device to help Pauline safely exercise her damaged hand by using the particular force and movements of her other hand. This way, we could help Pauline carefully train her hand to the limits of her other hand while avoiding the use of low-quality electrical motors (likely to bug out and cause further damage).
After sifting through various ideas to decide on a final approach for our engineering project, we began by modifying a single mechanical hand (originally designed to lie flush against an amputee stump) to lie on top of Pauline’s hand and to string each joint to individually correspond to the appropriate finger on a layered glove designed to go over the other hand. Like this, we could set the system up so that making a movement in the right hand would force a mirrored movement in the other hand- thereby exercising the injured hand without risk of damage as it would be guaranteed to be in the normal range for movement for her particular hand.
Student Project Problems
In practice, as with many projects for students, we ran into some problems during development. We tried to minimise these as much as possible during production, however, with the time we had, we weren’t able to resolve them completely.
Once our engineering project was fully constructed and we began to test it, we discovered our mechanical hand turned out to actually have a pretty poor ability to transfer the same amount of force exerted from the opposite hand. Unfortunately, accurately transferring a similar amount of force between hands was a necessary part of how the design worked; because of this, we’d need to make some major adjustments to the wiring if we were going to develop our student project further. We also had some slight difficulty matching sizing, as due to the mechanical hands we were adapting being designed for amputees, they were not proportional to real human hands and contained oddly sized fingers compared to the palm. Again, if we were to develop our Hackcessible engineering project further, we would spend time designing and 3D printing our own hand to be perfect for our purposes.
Lessons Learned
Projects for engineering students often focus on academic and technical skills- and although we did learn and develop plenty of those during Hackcessible, we also developed some of the more business-focused skills too. For our original student project, we spent a lot of time working on designing a glove that the damaged hand would sit inside- but soon discovered that due to the nature of Pauline’s nerve damage, a glove-based engineering project was not on the menu. After getting feedback from the client’s husband, we found out that putting gloves on was actually very difficult for Pauline and could even result in more damage to her hand as she wouldn’t be able to feel the position of her fingers inside the device. As a result, we swiftly changed the direction of our student project and focused on creating a device that could safely sit on top of her hand instead. This experience has definitely helped to highlight the importance of getting regular client feedback during any engineering project and isn’t something that we really get exposed to when working on any other university projects for engineering students.
In conclusion, we had a great experience working on our Hackcessible student project for Pauline and would like to give special thanks for the support from Hackcessible mentors and supplies from RS Components!
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0229530
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