MicroMedic Contest

The MicroMedic Contest sponsored by Parallax and the US Army proved to be rather hard.  Designing a device that could be used in the medical field is a far cry from robotics design.  Because when you design something as a medical device you are designing something to be used on a human, presumable a sick or injured human. 

Our final design concept was a wearable health monitor with a wireless interface.  Our design used the Parallax Propeller Board of Education as the main controller.  We also used the LM35 temperature sensor, wireless heart rate monitor, SPo2 finger sensor, 4 directional tilt sensor and mico-sd memory card slot on the Prop BOE.  We wanted to add a Bluetooth link with an interface for PC or smart phone but we did not incorporate it.  We also used the IR detector and IR universal remote control from the kit to create a user interface for settings and control. 

We were able to integrate all the sensors but I feel we were pretty far from a truly useful product, but we were on the right path.

 (Work in progress)

In the end out project suffered from personal time management, things kept getting in the way and the time for the project and contest kept being pushed back.  From this experience it has lead me to study AGILE.  AGILE is a system used by businesses, usually software development teams to continual release product updates through value added increments.  It's usually applied to teams where you would have managers, project managers, sales managers, programmers, application testers and so on.  But there are many articles on the web were AGILE has been adapted for individual use.

My next post will follow up on how I have implemented AGILE.