Sponsor: Texas Children’s Hospital
For their senior capstone, five students designed and modeled a more efficient way to provide young patients with foot and ankle orthotics.
Project need: Current orthotics are either generalized pieces designed for adults or customized devices that take lots of time and money to make because it involves shipping a mold of the foot to a company.
The team had the opportunity to visit the orthopedic surgeon’s office in Houston to learn more about the setting. The office sees about 25 patients a day. Ryan Shepherd said that day helped provide context for the impact of their project.
“They were showing us all the different types of orthotics that they had, and there was a little boy, probably about three years old. They brought him over and showed us his little orthotic, and it was really impactful to see how important that was for his life and important our senior design project was,” Shepherd said. “It put a face to what you were working on.”
Solution: The team designed an orthotic device that will help children with foot-ankle malalignments some patients as young as six months old. The team had to develop a plan and prototype that landed at the perfect intersection of timely and customizable.
“It’s been a lot of trial and error, a lot of different testing,” said Emily Burrows. “Our sponsor is very ambitious. I think that pushes us and challenges us more and gives us that drive to be successful. They’ve been helpful and clear on what they want.”
The process of outfitting a patient with an orthotic would involve a patient coming in the clinic and their foot and ankle being scanned on a stand. Once the scan is complete, software will allow clinicians to virtually place an orthotic design over it to make sure it is customized. Then the orthotic can be 3D printed. Overall, the process is expected to take just a few hours.
Challenges: The team had to take knowledge from the classroom and try to apply it to processes they had little experience in: 3D scanning, software manipulation and 3D printing on a medical-grade scale. Although it was intimidating, it meant that every moment of progress and success was a milestone to celebrate along the way, from finding out that they could use an Xbox Kinect as a scanner to applying for a $50,000 grant.
“With this project, the scope is big and there’s so many things. But we’ve worked from bookends in, a testament to our work ethic,” Isabelle Agurcia said. “There’s multiple times that we’ve used our resources beyond what probably normal teams do. You’re not being asked to reinvent the wheel; you’re just being asked to add something new to the wheel.”
Broader impact on students: Javier Eraña said he had not experienced a group project quite like the senior design throughout college.
“We build on one another; we help each other in everything,” Eraña said. “Anywhere you work in the future, you’re going to be working in a group essentially, and this is the first real team where I feel like I’ve learned a lot in that aspect.”
“Biomedical engineering is a generalist major. There’s so many things you can go into, so this project has allowed us to specialize a little bit more,” Corbin Petersheim said. “This is the standard by which I’ll judge future teams going forward.”