Today we started our the day in the bioengineering lab of the engineering school where two of Saioa’s research partners presented a wheelchair designed with sensors to detect patients balance while in the chair and determine how there weight is distributed and if or how a fall out of the chair occurs. The design typically uses infrared sensors but they are designing an app that follows the sensors as well. We then shifted gears to conducting our own research. We started with a warm up, part of which entailed drawing yourself currently and in 10 years. I drew my future self as a CRNA in Boston with a nice beach house making money working for Boston’s Children’s Hospital and doing what I love!
We then began working on our assigned projects. My group’s focus was on ensuring patient safety during transfers from one bed to another. Our scenarios included an intubated patient with an IV, a patient with a spinal cord injury, and a patient of heavier weight. My group’s focus tried the various methods mentioned within our provided videos such as lifting with a bed sheet to determine some of the pain points involved with transfers. Some of these pain points discussed were ensuring patient comfort and stability especially of the head and neck region as well as ensuring staff safety from strenuous lifting. our prototype to counter these pain points involved 2 stiff boards used to transfer the patient from bed to bed using a system in which wheels would roll on a track in a unilateral movement so staff would not be required to uncomfortably lift patients and patients could securely be transferred. Overall, this project was very insightful into the realities within our healthcare system and the technologies and innovations that are able to make it possible.
Later, we trekked through the rain to the Fine Arts Museum where a tour guide explained the history behind various exhibits in which one artist only contributes to the painting once a year leaving it unfinished as of now, one painting made up of numerous singular brush strokes, and Pittsburgh’s own Andy Warhol’s poinsettia art.
