A Week in the Dev Lab

This week marks the halfway point of our time in Ecuador with ROMP. It’s crazy how fast it’s going by! Here’s an update on what we’ve been up to.

Last week, we spent every day in the Dev Lab because Dave was in Guatemala with GoPro, filming at ROMP’s location there. It was a great time to get work done on our main projects. I got most of a new Victoria hand printed and partially assembled, wrote a test protocol for the hands in English and Spanish, and spent lots of time designing, prototyping, and testing a new design for a prosthetic liner mold that will enable ROMP to cast their own liners. Collin was busy finishing up the HackBerry hand and brainstorming and designing the dressing device he’s working on.

Prototype #2 of the 3D printed liner mold

Last weekend, Collin and I took a day trip to Otavalo, a smaller town about an hour and a half north of Quito. We stopped by the artisan market that occupies the city square, then made our way out to Laguna de Cuicocha. This is another crater lake in a collapsed caldera that has two islands in the middle of it that supposedly look like guinea pigs, called “cuy” in the Ecuadorian native tongue Quichua. We took an amazing hike around the caldera then returned to Otavalo then Quito.

Overlooking Cuicocha

This week, we were back in the clinic Monday and Wednesday and I got to test and refine the design of the liner mold. The design we’re working on looks promising. During a lull in the process of creating prostheses, Collin started reorganizing part of the lab in the clinic to make our work more efficient.

Making design modifications to the liner mold in CAD

It’s so rewarding to start seeing progress toward the goals that we set for our projects. The little successes we achieved this week by continuing manufacturing, having prototypes pass tests, and inventing novel new ways of solving a problem are driving me to make my last four weeks even better than the first.