Design Project

Hey!
So since we are done our research papers, we are moving on to our design projects! For our projects, we are going to be divided into teams of three or four people to design a device that monitors and delivers pain medication for oral ingestion for someone. This device is similar to PCAs, which are patient-controlled analgesics; these devices deliver medication into the body via wires and tubing. A potential problem with these devices is that irritation and infections can occur at the place were the tubes are connected to the inside of the body.

Just as with many other medical devices, the device has to be safe for use or else the FDA would not approve it and no one would want to use it. Some basic security features in PCA and PCOA devices are requiring a password for different levels of security which can be the user, a clinician, and a doctor, a lock time after a dose is administered, and a maximum number of doses that are allowed to be dispensed in a certain period of time. These precautions help to ensure that an overdose does not happen and that any settings on the device are not changed by someone unauthorized to change them. The password also helps to ensure that only the intended user or authorized personnel such as a doctor can demand a dose of the medication. We have to take these safety precautions into considerations while we are designing our device.

The device that we are designing is a PCOA, a patient-controlled oral analgesic. In our groups, we have to make sure we do not "reinvent the wheel" or "reinvent the broken wheel;" this means that we have to make sure that our design has not been tried before. Also, we have to make sure that we meet certain criteria; the basic specifications that our device has to meet are:
1) 200 dose capacity
2) it has to be secure
3) it has to limit doses with both a lock out time and a permissible amount of doses
4) it has to record both the time of a dose demand and the result of the dose demand

Also, while designing, we have to keep in mind that we cannot make our device do everything that we want it to; restrictions such as battery life or size are just two specifications that can limit our design. We have to remember that a device cannot possibly do everything that we want it to; we will have to sacrifice something in order to make our device do something else. I foresee this being a challenge for me because I always want to do everything.

On the outside, this design project seems to be dealing with a fairly simple idea, but, on deeper inspection, there is a lot more than meets the eye! After tomorrow's recitation I will post about my groups initial thoughts and quick brainstorms for our design.

(Also, I tried reading the documents that my professor posted on the blackboard site, but for some reason they are not loading on my computer; not even the slide show with the directions is loading. This is sort of frustrating...hopefully it works soon.)