Abstract
Technical Project:
Those who undergo strokes often undergo long-term health effects that impact their daily routine and motion capabilities. Some of these long-term effects include the reduction or loss of mobility in their contralateral arm. As a result, their rehabilitation requires various physical therapy exercises that utilize expensive or inaccessible technology that focuses on reinforcing repetitive movements to retrain the mind for those movements. Current technologies and physical therapy sessions can also be inconvenient for some patients especially with the large devices and limited focuses on certain movements, and neglect smaller fine motor movements like at the wrist. With that, our team has built a four degree of freedom, soft-robotic wearable exoskeleton for stroke rehabilitation, attacking the problem of inequitable and inconvenient access to typical physical rehabilitation methods and technologies. The four degrees of freedom our design focuses on elbow supination and pronation, as well as flexion and extension, and wrist abduction and adduction, as well as flexion and extension. Our design implements various motors controlled by homemade bowden cables to create a pulley system and provide elbow movement, in addition to linear actuators responsible for wrist movement. Together, the cables and linear actuators are routed on a wearable arm compression sleeve with custom channels. All of the electrical components are also housed in a custom electronics box inside a backpack that users will wear. The simplistic, lightweight design helps create a more affordable and accessible stroke rehabilitation method, as well as improve future designs and progression towards more efficient stroke rehabilitation.
STS Project:
Third places are places outside of the workplace and home that inhibit people to interact with others and build relationships within their community. While these places vary and look different across the world, they each serve the same purpose of community building, meeting new people, and hearing from new perspectives, all at low or zero costs. A prime example of a third place is somewhere to sit down and eat or drink, like a coffee shop. In East Asia however, a recognizable example of this is their convenience stores. With that, my STS project focuses on comparing the infrastructure and sociotechnical differences in convenience store culture in the U.S. versus East Asia, and how these differences impact their role as a third space. More specifically, the U.S. convenience store culture focuses more on efficiency and quick transactions, implementing less seating areas and convenient locations, discouraging the goals third places strive for. On the other hand, East Asia convenience stores always have designated and designed seating areas, mailing services, ticket services, and other amenities otherwise not found in stores in the U.S. Those amenities help provide an environment that encourages customers to linger longer and give a space for people to interact with friends or employees to community build like how third places aim to do. My project revealed how not only do those amenities and technology differences contribute to the difference in culture, but historical context, such as zoning and city development and social cultures, in each region contribute to the circumstances that allow convenience stores to, for East Asia, promote being a third place, but discourage for the U.S. Overall, these factors help aid my argument that stores in East Asia are a demonstration on how everyday spaces can foster stronger communities. Understanding the differences across regions can influence how we design community spaces in the future, as well as the impact we can create with that.
Notes
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering
Technical Advisor: Sarah Sun
STS Advisor: Karina Ripley
Technical Team Members: Aidan Mermagen, Andrew Wittman, Juan Gomez, Katherine Page, Madelyn Tubbs, Ryan Murray, Sam Moran, Sean Pawlowski, Zoe Benton
