MECHANICAL ENGINEER HELPS EYE DOCTORS TURN SMART PHONE INTO DIAGNOSTIC TOOL

                                                                                                                           

                                                                                                 

In this interdisciplinary project, graduate student Alexandre Jais turned out quick prototypes on his 3D printer at home.....

Interesting Story Line: 

Stanford engineers love to solve real world problems, and one recent example of this arises from a story about how researchers at Stanford Medical School turned a smartphone into an inexpensive tool for doing eye examinations in the field.

The idea is to use the smartphone’s built-in camera to take diagnostic images of the retina, optic nerve and other eye tissues. To accomplish this the researchers developed an adaptor that holds the smartphone and a magnification lens. The lens peers into the eye. The adaptor holds the smartphone camera at just the right distance from the lens to take a sharp picture of the magnified image of the inner eye.

Alexandre Jais, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, is part of the team that developed this adapter. He built the first prototypes on his personal 3-D printer and worked with the medical team to refine the adapter using equipment at the Stanford Product Realization Laboratory.

The new system allows ordinary medical practitioners to take eye scans and transmit them online to specialists for diagnosis.

“Think Instagram for the eye,” said one of the developers, assistant professor of ophthalmology Robert Chang, MD.

Jais became involved in the project last year after he met Chang at the StartX Medical Innovation Challenge, an event that encourages practical projects focused on health.

“We had a quick and dirty prototype ready within days and kept working on simpler designs that I could prototype using my 3D Printer at home” Jais said. “Having access to that home machine allowed me to iterate extremely quickly, and feedback from the physicians testing the device allowed us to refine the device for high definition prototyping at the PRL.”

The device has obvious benefits in the developing world, where it puts an inexpensive tool in the hands of ordinary medical practitioners in the remote locations.

But it could be just as relevant here in settings where time is of the essence.

“Imagine a car accident victim arriving in the emergency department with an eye injury resulting in a hyphema – blood inside the front of her eye,” Myung said. “Normally the physician would have to describe this finding in her electronic record with words alone. Smartphones today not only have the camera resolution to supplement those words with a high-resolution photo but also the data-transfer capability to upload that photo securely to the medical record in a matter of seconds.”

For Jais, the pace of the project has been as exciting as the outcome.

“I’m extremely happy to be part of the team, especially as more and more doctors are starting to use our device,” he said, adding that the team is getting funding to increase production, which will give him a chance to work on new engineering challenges.

STANFORD STUDENTS LEARN TO BUILD THEIR OWN BIKES

One of the most popular courses run by the Product Realization Lab, ME 204 teaches students how to build bicycles, but also patience and project management.

Youtube link... https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UI41yB16L1M

STORY LINE :

In the summer of 2001, Ryan Connolly wanted to build a bicycle from scratch. Connolly, a master's student majoring in manufacturing systems engineering, had met a master frame builder in Palo Alto and convinced him to come to the Product Realization Lab (PRL) and share his knowledge.

That fall quarter, Connolly learned to design and build a frame and fork. In the winter quarter, he built all of the necessary tools, jigs and fixtures required to build not just a single frame, but many.

Word of his pet project spread throughout the lab, and by the spring quarter, Connolly himself was teaching a dozen students how to build their own bicycles. He never stopped. For the past dozen years, Connolly, now a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering's Design Group, has taught ME 204, Bicycle Design and Frame-Building, one of the most popular courses offered at the PRL.

"It takes over a hundred hours, but when they leave this class, they will ride away on a bicycle that is as well designed and constructed as any bicycle from a custom shop," Connolly said.

Each year, about 12 students enter the two-quarter course with many of the skills required to build a bike – some can already weld and braze, but each student must already be comfortable working in the PRL. They start with a rough blueprint, and each week Connolly and Scott Kohn, who has co-taught the course for the past several years, lead the class through the next steps in the design and manufacturing process. The students start with lengths of steel tubing and learn how to manipulate several specialized bike tools used by professional bike builders to craft a frame.

"It's not just about making the frame," said Oliver Riihiluoma, who just completed his master's degree in mechanical engineering. "There are a hundred parts that go onto the frame, and you've got to figure out how to make them all work together. The frame needs to fit the wheels, the wheels need to be compatible with the brakes. You need to have a lot of patience and confidence in your design."

Many of the students who take ME 204 have aspirations of working in product design or similar roles after graduation. The experience of aligning hundreds of small steps is a great exercise in project management, said Kohn, a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

"They need to figure out what components they'll need, source them and order them in the correct sequence so that production doesn't slow down," Kohn said. "They need to weigh aesthetic decisions against practical considerations."

Building a bicycle is a surprisingly tall order, and the tiniest details can be the difference between a bike that glides and one that tips over. Align the front fork at the wrong angle, for example, and the front wheel will swivel erratically like a broken wheel on a shopping cart.

"Sometimes they make bad design decisions, and they have to start over," Kohn said. "Figuring out how to salvage some parts of the project and move on is a really useful experience."

The Conclusion:

"A lot of things that you build at Stanford, the motivation is to get a grade. You might spend a ton of hours making a prototype, or even a really polished product, but you still toss it at the end of the quarter," Riihiluoma said. "This bike is going to be with me a lot longer than that. It's awesome to graduate and take this with me."