Week 7
Week seven began with the work of producing working prototypes of our projects. On monday we started with discussing the deliverables for the week with emphasis on workload division and everyone's deliverables for the four days of prototyping. At 10am we had a workshop on zoom with BuhleTshabangu Moyo who walked us through the communication and presentation strategies. The workshop was attended by interns from Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences(MUBAS) as well as interns from Malawi University of Science and Technology(MUST) along with our teaching assistants and Will Moyo, our manager. After the workshop which ended at 1:15pm we had a small break and started off with our tasks.
On Tuesday, as each member of our team was working on the tasks they were assigned, we had a visit from the US ambassador David Young together with his team along with the vice chancellor prof. Nancy Chitera. We had a wonderful time presenting our low fidelity prototypes which I must say went really well considering how the visit was on a short notice. We later had the privilege to have street food with the ambassador which was chips made locally on what we call Chiwaya. After that wonderful lunch I went back to our prototyping work in which I started working on the temperature sensor which would be used to monitor a neonate's temperature.
On wednesday, I started working on the NoIR camera system and trying to get the system to work with infrared LEDs which was not successful as the LEDs were not functional. I later started working on the temperature sensor for the neonate using the temperature probe that we were given to use. I ran into some issues trying to use this sensor as the reading it was giving was questionable so I started employing other means to measure the temperature. I ended up choosing to use a thermistor which started showing promising results. We later took a picture using the NoIR camera and my colleague tried to perform some image processing with it.
On thursday, I finished the camera system using a perforated board and we also tested the system. I also integrated an LCD to the neonatal monitor and integrated the respiration sensing element of the monitor. By the end of the day we had integrated systems for all the three projects. On Friday we concluded the prototypes by making cardboard casings for the projects and had presentations and presented them in the afternoon. The presentations were attended by Dr Chepuka who along with our teaching assistants, Will Moyo our Manager and Mr. Hillary Lodzanyama gave us constructive feedback and with that we concluded the week.
Overall the week was a tough one with an exciting end. The deliverables were a lot to meet and we spent the week only focused on the tasks and the progress seemed stuck but on thursday we had 80% of our workload done. Next week appears to be more work than this week but at this stage we’ve gotten confident in ourselves and know that we are going to deliver.