Daily Journal: Collective Documentation
Most of the documentation for individual projects was done on one of the four individual portfolios. These porfolios can be found in the about page. This is collective documentation and major milestone updates about all four of our work on these projects for Atrium Health.
Our first visit to the Atrium Carolina’s Rehabilitation Center in Charlotte was September 26th. We toured their assistive technology lab and were able to see a lot of the current devices they are using. Then we took a tour of their gym on the first floor and met one of their patients “Jordan,” a 23 year old male who has issues walking and tremors due to a stroke, and we were able to see him practice walking across the gym with a walker. We then toured the gym on the spinal and brain trauma floor and met a 21 year old we call “Shaq” whose spinal cord was severed after he was shot in the back. We discussed with the nurses what kinds of devices they were already using and what needed to be improved.
October 3rd, 2025: Today we began designing the donning tubes. Marisol made the design for the donning tube, but everyone else had input on dimensions. Our plan is to have 2 variations each with three possible sizes to ensure that the donning tubes can reach a wider group of patients. There will be short or long donning tubes that come in small, medium, and large sizes. Karlin and Caroline found a file for the quadstick mouthpiece to begin printing it out. Scarlett finished filling out the spreadsheet for everyone’s jobs on the projects.
October 7th, 2025: Today Marisol completed her 5 versions of the donning tubes and uploaded screenshots to the Git. Scarlett began printing for the mounts and organized the supports in Bambu accordingly. Karlin gathered the 3 hole narrow, 3 hole wide, 4 hole narrow, 4 hole wide models of the quadstick mouthpiece onto to 1 file and printed them. Marisol will add her designs to the shared drive with the hospital and will print next class. Caroline was not in class today but will continue working with Scarlett when she returns.
October 8th, 2025: Today Scarlett and Caroline printed out an alternate option for the video game mount using ratchet locking joints. Marisol printed out the medium handles donning tube and had to scale it down to 70% to be able to fit on the printer because the design is too big for the plate. Karlin printed out another set of the Quadstick mouthpieces and adjusted some of the supports before printing.
October 17th, 2025: Today Karlin started researching methods on how to attach a water bottle holder to a wheelchair. She discovered that using a holster similar to a bike water bottle holder would work best. She then moved on to designing and researching the best waterbottle and straw attachment.
October 21st, 2025: Today we put together our schedules in a spreadsheet to compare when we can host meetings with the other students that want to be involved with Pearl. This involved marking what days we can come before or stay after and assign projects such as mass printing jobs or recreating designs for us. Once we have a full meeting outside of school, it will be much easier to catch up during community time during school and check in on their progress and/or assign new tasks. This will be helpful because the younger/less experienced kids can get involved and help without having too much responsibility. This is also a cool opportunity for the four of us because we can focus on design and programming (the more creative side of Pearl) and less on watching the 3D printers crank out ten of the same design. However, it is good for theother students to learn how to handle all of the tools in the lab so it is a win win for both parties.
October 30th, 2025: We organized a meeting with the underclassmen who are also interested in the intership with the Pearl. We will lead them and train them to be able to take over these projects once we graduate. The four of us will rotate every two months through the following leadership positions: Project Coordinator (Communicates with hospital staff, manage overall project timelines), Operations Lead (Organizes the larger group of students, creates the working schedule, manages workspace), Technical and Design Lead (Researches and approves all projects, creates build plans, prototypes new ideas), Quality Assurance and Safety Lead (Creates a safety and quality checklist, manages safety protocols, conducts final testing).
November 5th, 2025: Karlin created a shared GitHub repository and portfolio for the FABLab Rehab projects. You can find this portfolio here and you can find the repository here.
November 11th, 2025: We had a Zoom meeting with Heather Smith, an OT that works with Atrium Health and is our main point of contact for these projects, to discuss our projects. Marisol spoke about the donning tube and how she has discovered how to make the design for the donning tube parametric. Mrs. Smith will be sending us some compression sock to adapt the desgin and test the product. Karlin spoke about and gave Mrs. Smith access to the file of the 4 QuadStick mouthpieces. Mrs. Smith told us that the Atrium Health Levine Children’s Hospital has a food safe 3D printer that they will print a test set of the mouthpieces on. It is currently being used to create mouth sticks that are used to tap on tablets, phones, etc. They will try each adaptation of the mouthpiece and tell us how to best change or produce the next prototypes. Caroline and Scarlett showed their current protoype mount they had recently 3D printed and assembled. Mrs. Smith reminded us that the goals for the mounts were to be universal, to work on wheelchairs and tables, be stable enough to hold something as heavy as an iPad without falling, be stable enough to not move out of the way, and be safe for everyone around it. We also told her about training for the underclassmen.