FRESH box 1.0 Beta complete!

Hey Everyone,
This weekend, we made our first prototype ice box! We bought materials from Home Depot then got to work at the Hillel center, where we used Jasons awesome power tools to build our box. Below are the pictures of our progress.

We began by cutting the lexan panes so as to make an 8"x8"x8" cube inside that would hold the vaccines:



Then we tried to cut the polystyrene, but the wire cutter would not work, as the wire had an enamel coating on it...So we tried to burn off the coating:


Then we decided to use the circular saw to cut the insulation, and it worked really well. We then embedded the lexan panes into the polystyrene and secured it with liquid nails:


Next, we put the rest of the insulation around the inside lexan cube and made a top to fit the box:



Finally, Sahil and Jason finished the box off by putting the corrugated plastic pieces around the outside:


The building team made really good progress this weekend. By building the box, we found out how to use all the tools, what works, and what does not. Now we can use this box to simulate ice box experiments that will model our actual final prototype!

-Ravi

New semester!

Well, Team FRESH is now in their final year - seniors! The project largely needs to be wrapped up by the end of this fall semester, leaving a couple of months for writing and tying up any loose ends. The summer was marked by a couple of changes. I moved lab and family to San Diego, which was a chaotic experience. Fortunately, both Team FRESH and Gemstone staff were supportive of and flexible in dealing with this adventure. (Thanks!) I'll continue to mentor from afar, and Gunja will take over the in person mentoring every other week. After some minor technical difficulties the first two weeks (one which was my fault and one which I can blame on some poor SDG&E worker in Arizona, who blacked out San Diego, parts of Arizona, and parts of Mexico!), weekly meetings are also in full swing. The new syllabus reflects ambitious, but realistic goals to wrap up the project.

The blog should be updated more regularly now that the semester is going strong. I continue to have high hopes! Good luck!

PCM measurements scheduled for next week on the DSC! (apparently the chamber was contaminated so they were rescheduled from tomorrow)

Business Plan Competition? I think so.

Team FRESH is now considering entering in next year’s University of Maryland $75K Business Plan Competition. Needless to say the prize money would be well-appreciated and put in to good use. This gives the marketing team even more of a push to get a good marketing plan written out. So far we seem to have a lot of the background research and rough estimates on the costs associated with the cold chain in past drafts of our thesis and concept paper. What remains generally is a cost comparison of our own product to that of our competitors.

-Amanda

Marketing Plan Search

The marketing team is currently on the search for a new marketing plan template. We all agree that our current marking plan template is too broad and does not account for the unique features of each individual cold chain. Unfortunately we can’t use the template we learned about at the Unite for Sight Conference because they asked not to have it cited or copied. There are conferences out there dedicated solely to healthcare product marketing and business plan development (http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/execed/Programs/HEALTHPRO.aspx), but of course, they are a few $1,000’s out of our budget (feel free to donate!!). We are currently trying to adapt a standard business plan to our needs in order to market specifically to Unicef, and other organizations responsible for the maintenance of the cold chain.

Frozen, Yo.

Last Thursday, we had our last mentor meeting with Dr. Shah for the semester. I can't believe we're going to be seniors next year! It seems like yesterday since we were researching less developed countries and their problems...oh how fast time flies by.

We met at Yogiberry instead of the boring engineering building. Everyone sat around and enjoyed frozen yogurts. It was a good bonding time. We talked about Angry Birds, Words with Friends, and whatever else we had on our mind. All in all, it was a great ending to the semester.

Good luck to everyone during finals!

Keeping it Fresh since 2008,
Young

Minutes - Mentor Meeting 4/28

Hey guys,

Here's the minutes from our mentor meeting on 4/28/11.

Undergraduate Research Day:

Success! Thanks to all the team members who volunteered and made everything go smoothly.

The editing team for the first three chapters of our Thesis completed their revisions. There are currently 5 objectives listed in our thesis (1 - is the concept paper; 2 - Characterize PCM...5- Marketing Plan). All of the edits can be noticed on the google doc (Sorry for the lack of details here...Matt talks extremely fast and I couldn't keep up with him).

This is a very rough draft of our thesis and still needs editing from our other editing teams. Also, the next team should take the paper out of a google doc and put it into a word document.

The main update is that all of the supplies have been purchased and construction will commence at Andrew's apartment this week.

The team social was on 4/30 at Ledo's (already happened because I'm late on this post. But it was a really fun time).

Looking forward to next semester, we really need to focus on our thesis and our prototype. The full thesis is due by the end of next semester (150 pages!!) By that time, we hope to talk to all external experts and invite them to our thesis defense in Spring 2012.

As far as team feedback from Dr. Shah goes, he generally said we're pretty awesome.

-Andrew