LESSONS INTERVIEWS RESEARCH……..
So far, this week has been interesting. It was both hectic and enjoyable. On Monday, we began the second stage of the engineering design process, which was understanding the problem context. Our TAs began by explaining what it is all about and how it applies to our various projects, and we learned that this stage is basically researching more about our projects. We were then assigned group activities to help us improve our understanding of the problem context before the day ended.
We resumed more activities related to the stage we were in on Tuesday morning. This took us the entire morning and was both involving and exciting at the same time. We had a group meeting in the afternoon with Hope Khasu, a previous intern from the Lemelson Foundation Rice 360 internship. During her time, she worked on the vein finder, which was the project assigned to us as a development project. She was a cheerful and enthusiastic person, and I personally enjoyed our meeting with her. She walked us through how she completed her project and gave us advice on how to complete ours. This brought our afternoon to an end.
Wednesday we had a workshop all day. The workshop was hosted by Mr Mafuta and was about needs finding and project scoping. So in this workshop he basically talked about how to look for projects, how to host interviews with potential clients about project ideas, how to observe situations and detect problems that need to be solved and many more other topics along the same lines. The workshop was held in the engineering board room and had a lot of food involved which made my fellow foodie interns very happy!!!
Thursday was a very busy day. It all started with me and my group members arriving at work early because our need-to-know list was incomplete. After generating our need to know list, we had to formulate some interview questions because we had an interview at 10 a.m. with Prince Mtethaonga, an epidemiologist with Rice 360 and Kamuzu University of Health Sciences.After formulating a few questions, we set out for QECH. Our meeting took place in his office at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital.When we arrived, he greeted us warmly, introduced himself, and we did the same, and our interview began. He explained a lot about Neonatal Monitors and vein finding in hospitals and how it is a challenge.Our interview lasted until 11:30 a.m. We left, returned to the design studio, went to lunch, and returned at 1PM. In the afternoon, we began conducting in-depth research on our projects. This required us to look for journals, articles, and books that discussed our projects in depth. We finished at 5 p.m. and agreed to continue our research the next day.
Friday was a full-day research day. My group members and I assigned research tasks to each other. I was tasked with researching the exploration of existing neonatal monitor solutions, what governs vein finders in terms of standards, regulations, and limitations. We spent all day researching this, and our week came to an end.