Today started off with two lectures at the School of Engineering. The first lecture was by a professor at the University who had previously worked as a nurse. He first talked about how the nursing program is structured in Spain and how it differed from the nursing program in the United States. One example of this is that nursing majors in Spain take more clinical hours, but do not take classes while working in the hospital. On the other hand, nursing majors in the United States have to take classes and do clinical hours simultaneously. The thing that I found most interesting from this lecture was his research on reusing “single use” medical devices such as pacemakers. He initially saw single use equipment being reused in the hospital that he worked at in Spain. There, the metals bits of blood transfusion sets were being reused through scrubbing and sterilization techniques. Doing further research in his free time he discovered that there were academic articles posted by Universities such as the University of Michigan showing that other medical devices such as pacemakers could be reused as well in a safe manner. The professor decided to expand upon this topic by contemplating whether or not it would be ethical to reuse pacemakers, what doctor’s professional opinions were on the reusing of pacemakers, and what the patients who received the reused pacemakers though of the idea as well.

The second lecture of the day was by a mechanical engineer who helped to design and build the Oreka balance. He started off by talking about the prototyping and design process when it comes to building a device. The most important thing when prototyping and designing a device is knowing who you are building the device for. He gave an example of a car and how a “good car” to a family might be a minivan because it gives more space and safety for children. However, a “good car” for a young adult would be something smaller, flashier, and faster. The same thing can be said for prosthetics. Some people have the money and desire to completely recover their range of motion. In this case he talked about a prosthetic that can be surgically inserted into the upper arm of a patient. Then the device senses muscle contractions in the upper arm in order to move the prosthetic much like a normal arm. However, this prosthetic takes time to install and takes much more money than a cheaper prosthetic which might recover only 80% of motion but can be installed much more quickly. Different types of prosthetics fulfill the variety of needs that patients have. The thing that I found most interesting was when he talked about the different ways, they test what parts of a device are working and not working when a device fails. This was important to me because in one my classes I had to build a radio and it was really confusing trying to figure out what the problem was, so I wanted to know for bigger scale projects how do they figure out errors when there are so many mechanisms involved. He explained by talking about the Oreka balance and how they can track resonance frequencies in a simulated version of the Oreka balance and also in real life to help identify mechanical failures.

After the two lectures we headed out to the main street in Bilbao where all the malls and shops are located. The malls were pretty standard to what you would find anywhere else. After browsing the different floors of one mall I finally founded a couple of clothes I liked and ended up buying a puffer vest. Finally, we ended the touring for the day by heading to a cooking class. Here we got to make a bunch of local food like gilda’s, tortillas, and goxua. I had already tried gilda’s earlier during the trip, but they were tasty, nonetheless. My favorite part though was piping the frosting onto the goxua, putting powdered onto it, and blowtorching it! Overall, gained a more holistic view of the healthcare system and also indulged more into the culture of Bilbao through crafting local delicacies. See you next time!