Dr. Gogola, back left, explains the difficulties with current technology for measuring forearm rotation.
On Thursday, the design teams met with the clients in order to discuss the projects. I worked with the Forearm Rotation team as they prepared for their meeting with Dr. Gogola, a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Shriner’s Hospital and the client for this project. During the preceding meeting, the freshmen had generated a list of questions to ask the client to clarify the details of the project; in addition, they created a google document to enable every team member to continue adding/editing the list of questions after class. As Dr. Gogola is the client for both Shriners projects, the two groups only had half of the total time to ask her questions and thus had to use their time very efficiently.
Before class, one of the team members printed out a copy of the question sheet for each member of the team. These questions had been divided into “Design” and “Logistics” categories and ranked by importance in case there was not enough time to ask all the questions. Fortunately, this turned out to be unnecessary as Dr. Gogola sped through the questions, giving informative, complete, and succinct answers to all of them, as well as offering ideas of her own. By the end of the day, the team had learned much from Dr. Gogola’s experience in the field. In addition, she had given the team her contact information as well as offered several dates and times when the team could visit Shriners to observe firsthand the existing methods for measuring range of motion.
Wheelchair group members look on as Dr. Gogola explains Pedro's condition.
In the wheelchair group, team members were itching to learn specifically about their client, whose name is Pedro. They learned that Pedro’s disability, arthrogryposis, makes some of his joints in his arms and legs immobile. They also learned more specific information about Pedro’s situation and why this design project is necessary. It was very exciting to meet Dr. Gogola and schedule a time to meet Pedro in person.