Progress Report, Week 2: September 20th

This week we have condensed our multitude of ideas into three main concepts and developed them until they became more streamlined design ideas. We have three, and each has its own level of complexity and premise distinct from the others.

We have confirmed the reasoning behind a non-electronic design by contacting our ‘customer’ at Engineering World Health. He states:

“My understanding is that, if the assist device is electronic, you might as well create a full electronic blood pressure meter. The point of this design is that one can measure BP with little to no training and, most importantly, without a power source.

For your second question, if you take into consideration that this is a non-electronic design, I hardly see how you could use this as a diagnostic tool which reads pressure AND categorizes it. The project description summarizes pretty well that the device should only function as an amplifier of the oscillatory pressure signal. I haven't given it much though but this already seems like a pretty difficult challenge.

Because an important application of this project is home monitoring, it can also be interesting for your team to look into the development of the picture instructions mentioned in the description.”

We have set up a weekly meeting time for our group, which is quite an accomplishment considering our collective schedule.

We have considered general things we would like to include in the design regardless of which premise we end up moving forward with. For example, the inclusion of a set of pictorial instructions for the user, and the use of a colored scale in addition to whatever indicator/gauge we design for a rudimentary visual pressure gauge, to account for the possibility that the user wouldn’t know the meaning of the numbers.

Next week (including tomorrow), we plan on completing the house of quality versus function chart and seriously considering the merits and drawbacks of each design. This includes the task of formalizing our verbally discussed yet still informal lists of customer needs and technical specifications.

While still developing the other ideas to become detailed enough to solve the problem and be presented as a solution, we would like to have an idea of which one is the best and begin focusing our main efforts toward that design.