StemCell Therapy

Posted By MyUVicLife on Oct 30, 2019 in Hands-on learning, Student life

On the weekend of October 4th, our team participated in this years Health and Regenerative Medicine Hackathon. We thought we would give a quick recap of the event as well as share our experience with you.

By: Natalie Koehn, Jacqui Moreland, Kim Arklie and Jacky Le

The second annual Health and Regenerative Medicine Hackathon was held at FortTectoriain downtown Victoria during the first weekend of October.

Traditionally, a hackathon is a competition where people gather to tackle coding and programming related challenges in a consecutive period of 24-48 hours. However, the Health and Regenerative Medicine Hackathon is different! The challenges as its name suggests are related to health and medicine. Due to the nature of the challenges, competitors were allowed to work on their designs during the month leading up to the Hackathon weekend.

The following challenges were presented to us by various organizations involved in Victorias health industry:

As a combined team of biomedical and mechanical engineers from the University of Victoria, we are passionate about creating assistive technology to solve health-related problems. We had worked together in a school group project in the past and were looking to find another opportunity to work together and design something meaningful.

Inspired by their patient stories and their mission to provide low-cost healthcare opportunities to developing countries, we were eager to take on the Victoria Hand Projects (VHP) challenge to create an assistive device to allow children to write.

A 3D printed solution was optimal for both the rapid prototyping of the Hackathon but also was one of the design requirements for the given project.

In the two weeks leading up to the Hackathon, we came up with a general design concept consisting of two major components an attachment mechanism to the prosthetic hand and a clamping mechanism for the writing utensil. A few iterations were made as a result of tests performed on our original design.

This led us to our final product that utilizes a three-prong and elastic mechanism to grasp the pencil. The pencil is housed in a cylindrical tube, held in place at an optimal angle, that attaches to a simple support that wraps around the bottom of the hand. The hand rests on a bed of silicone at the base of the device in order to prevent unwanted movement, and tightly secured with avelcrostrap.

It was inspiring coming together on the final day of the Hackathon to see the hard work of each group come to life to create such a wide range of solutions. The panel of judges, sponsors and professionals that attended the event were just as passionate about the projects as we were. They provided feedback and support to the teams throughout the Hackathon and helped make the event possible.

All in all, it was a great opportunity and we are looking forward to participating in next years Hackathon. We encourage anyone who is interested in STEM related fields to engage in opportunities like this and explore the design world in a fun, out of school environment!

The views expressed in this blog are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the policies or views of the University of Victoria. I monitor posts and comments to ensure all content complies with the University of Victoria Guidelines on Blogging.

More:
2019 Health and Regenerative Medicine Hackathon - University of Victoria News

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