Interdisciplinary
Project Overview:
Robert Florio is a30 year old male who had a C4 Spinal Cord Injury in 1996. Robert has active shoulder, elbow flexion, and forearm supination, with Fair+/Good strength. He does not have active wrist or finger motion. He has developed neck pain from years of mouthstick use. His PT has suggested that he minimize positioning his head/neck in full flexion (bringing his chin to this chest), to avoid increased neck pain. Robert currently uses two straps to hold his guitar in place for playing. He wears a wrist support on his right hand with a cuff that holds a pick. Robert uses the whammy bar to support his hand as he strums the strings. Robert wears a rollerball glove on his left hand, and uses the edge of the glove to press against the guitar strings for chording.
Rob's Guitar Adaptation (RGA) embarked upon helping enable rob to more easily play guitar. With Regards to my grand challenge and my graduate school in the future. It is incredible to have processes for developing scientific tools for discovery with humans in the loop. This means keeping Rob in the loop the entire way so he can have input on what he can do, where there could be problems, and more generally - ideas of what he would want in RGA.
As an avid guitar player myself, I got to mold together the areas of music, entrepreneurship, and electromechanical design. I learned a great deal of team management, delegation, The experience was an ENME 444, mechanical engineering senior design, one-semester capstone project. This project was made possible by the support of my other teammates (see poster below) and the VLINC organization (see service section) and finally the UMBC mechanical engineering department.
Integrity - The system at the end of the day is build, designed, and delivered by students. We need to ensure that what we say the device will do, it in fact will. The important part of a VLINC project is ensuring the users can use their devices after the teams graduate. As engineers and citizens, we have an obligation to hold our products to our word.
Perspectivism – A big take away from this process was having a human in-the-loop design process. We had to better understand Rob's perspective to effectively give him a solution that worked well. For example, he wants to be able to sing while playing which we didn't know about till later and that saved us a lot of time because then that cancelled out the idea of using a sip-and-blow scheme.
Realistic vision – If we look at the bottom half of the poster above, in the center is a design for a cam system which would have specific notches art specific angles. This would allow the playing of different chords through different combinations of shaft angles (the 8 most common cords can be played on the first three frets). However, building such specified parts for a system would be incredibly difficult as they have near 0 compliance allowed. If we used another manufacturer the wait time would be on the scale of months and the cost on the scale of hundreds per cam. We pivoted to our final design after seeing a more realistic vision of what we wanted to accomplish.
Teamwork - This project couldn't have been accomplished to the depth that it was without a team. The most difficult part was the scheduling of different people.
Persistence - There were many problems we encountered throughout the project that we didn't think we could solve. What we would discover is that that's precisely what we can do. Given enough thought and time, each obstacle we encountered, we overcame.
Flexibility - Throughout the project, our interpretation of Rob's preferences would have to change. We needed to pivot away from many ideas because we realized that the idea we had didn't' necessarily fulfil what he wanted.
Interdisciplinary specific learning objectives include identifying different disciplines to contribute to a complex problem, describing and applying interdisciplinary strategies, and describing and applying bridging strategies. My knowledge of guitar helped better inform my mechanical design as did the reverse. After working on how to get as many chords as possible by looking at common progressions, I realized I could simply the problem greatly by using open cords such that we could actuate on a single fret and play a new cord. I was very excited to bring my hobby to help cap of my engineering degree and look forward to using the new skills I gained in management, documentation, and design in the future.