TRIP TO HOME DEPOT

Last night, Sahil and I went to Home Depot to buy a few of the supplies needed to begin construction of our prototype. There were only two items on the list: a sheet of polyisocyanurate and and two sheets of extruded polystyrene. Luckily for us, the local home depot in College Park carried the two exact brands of insulation we were looking for.

HOWEVER, Sahil failed to mention to me that the sheets of insulation were enourmous. To be exact, one sheet was 4 ft. x 8ft; the other was 2ft. by 8ft. There was no chance of these fitting in my small sedan. We opted to wait until Jason fixed his convertible so that we could fit the sheets in his car with the top down.

April 12th Non-Mentor Meeting

Our Tuesday night meeting was a meeting to remember. Matt was conflict resolution (read: food provider), and we all thought that he had forgotten to bring some chow... but suddenly he pulled out an enormous steak from his netbook... and voila! we had a feast.

Now, that clearly didn't happen... but imagine if it did! In truth, we reviewed our goals for the week, and heard Ravi give a run-through of his upcoming Unite for Sight presentation. He spoke clearly and intelligently, and we are excited to hear the feedback he gets from the conference this weekend. He will go through another dry-run this Thursday in our mentor meeting with Dr. Shah.

We broke up into sub-teams after to bring everyone up to date:

Materials/Construction: ordered all parts, and is awaiting arrival. Will be going on a field trip tomorrow to the local Home Depot (We can do it, and they can help!) to purchase the remaining materials.

Case Study: Deciding on an "action plan" to merge the Thesis proposal and NSF proposal into a formidable study!

NBA Playoff's Team: Andrew took 3:1 odds that the Knicks make it farther in the playoffs than the Hawks.

Modeling: Matt and Kelly will spend the next few days breathing Comsol, and experimenting ElmerFem... an opensource finite element analysis software based out of Finland... sounds like a blast!

Good luck Team and keep it FRESH!

- Jason

Imagine...A Stronger Health Workforce

Here’s a great animation produced by the Global Health Workforce Alliance regarding the importance of health workers.

Follow ‘Flo’, a skilled health worker who leaves her home in search of a better life. What happens to the people she leaves behind? What would it take to keep her in her own community, saving lives and improving the health of the people there?

Think Cold Chain

April 7th Mentor Meeting

Today we had our usual meeting with Dr. Shah to discuss our week's progress.  Marketing reported on the rough cost analysis they completed and recorded in a Google spreadsheet ("Pricing"--I shared it with you guys).  The projected cost for the materials that make up the ice box, excluding PCM, currently stands at about $27.  We also have an estimate on how much money we're saving from preventing vaccines from being exposed to freezing temperatures (assuming those vaccines are spoiled upon exposure).  Last, we took a look at the WHO and UNICEF vaccine carriers, and benchmarked some prices.  As of now, we're at least competitive.  Moving forward we need to do the final calculation matching our product up to the field.  Marketing had some help from team members from other subteams-- Sahil and Ravi.  The commitment of all our team members never fails to inspire me, and I really think it'll prove fruitful both for our team in the short-term, and the world in the long-term.  Glad to know all of our teammates and be part of FRESH.

Not to get too mushy, I'll keep going with the minutes.  Matt had an idea on testing the technological advantage of using our approach surrounding using sensors on the PCM against the existing approach involving the shake test.  More details to come from the PCM team on how they will do this.  Quint, Amina, and Amanda plan to go in to Dr. Shah's lab tomorrow at noon to set some experimental goals and get cracking.  Hopefully we can best utilize the skills of our cool high school assistant, Oheni, before he leaves us.  

For the thesis, our first editing group will be Matt, Amina, Foo and Young.  Thanks for going first guys!  The entire team will be editing the thesis at some point, but it was great that these four stepped up.  We're going to need some experts to read over our thesis, so we're going to try to contact some professors we've worked with in the past.  

Since our ice box is really taking shape now, our team is now trying to figure out strategies to integrate a marketing plan in the field.  Towards this end, the team decided to start asking experts the set of questions we formed some time ago.  Also, we're going to try to look for small grants that may help us along the way.  The team is also considering the MTech Entrepreneurship competition for senior year.  

That's all folks, have a great weekend!

~Veena

April 5th Non-Mentor Meeting

Great meeting tonight FRESH!

Here are a few notes to keep us focused for the next week.  Since we don't have too many tangible goals down for the remainder of the semester, Young suggested we brainstorm a set to keep us accountable.  Awesome idea, Meeting Lead!

Most exciting news first- our other PCM has arrived at last.  Now all we have to do is test it against the Greenbox PCM.  Quint and the rest of the PCM team hope to accomplish this in the next two weeks.  Next up, our presentation team is continuing to revise the poster they designed for Undergraduate Research Day, as well as getting a script ready for the 5 minute (so short) Unite for Sight presentation.

In terms of actually building this box, we still have a few hurdles to cross.  After paying for the PCMs, thermocouples, and conference fees, we have depleted all of our Gemstone funding.  Since we have so many creative people on our team, we really view this as a blessing in disguise.  Just imagine all of the fun ways we can raise some cash-- bake sales, fundraisers, Foo's online schemes, there's a lot out there.  [But NSF, if you're reading this, please feel free to throw us some cash this way.  We will gladly take it!]

The construction team made the final list of materials needed to design the box, so we're really waiting on the money (about $55) to go out to Home Depot and buy them.  This week they will start contacting people in the engineering department/mechanics shop to get a better idea of the steps to physically construct this box.  Also in light of long-term mass manufacturing costs (knock on wood, we get there!), we want to get an idea of how buying individual panels matches up with creating a mold for a box.

Moving on, the finite elements team is hard at work on the modeling.  Kelly briefed the rest of the team on some errors that came up in the program.  It's only a matter of time until these two (Kelly and Matt) get it right...If you guys can't do it, I don't know who else can.  Finite elements will give us an update in two weeks.

Proposal team (me, Amanda, Amina, Jason) briefly addressed refining the first three chapters of our thesis (including the potential public health concept paper).  In the next week, each subteam will internally edit their contribution to the thesis.  The following week, an editing team will be selected to nail the grammar and style issues.

Last, but not least, the marketing team (plus a few others) trudged on in their effort to get a projected price for our box.  Sahil, Ravi, Young, and I worked on this for the majority of the time.  We looked over some of the articles we've collected over the past few months, and found some valuable stats regarding freeze exposure rates (based on a systematic lit review of cold chain studies), and even a few speaking to how precise the FreezeWatch is in detecting loss of vaccine potency.  Another interesting statistic we found pointed to ~16% freeze exposure found in developed countries, compared to ~35% in developing countries while in transport...I also saw an article in the American Journal of Public Health the other day on detecting freezing in the Texas cold chain.  Maybe we ought to revisit the industrialized world to see what lessons they can teach us.  Even after using PCM's and expensive infrastructure, there still seems to be freezing.

The percentage of wastage is enormous, meaning the sum of money lost is enormous, which has left us enormously confused as to how these rates could possibly be true.  Why hasn't something been done about this loss earlier?  Still thinking on that one.  More updates to come.

~Veena

March 31 Mentor Meeting

At our mentor meeting, we discussed next semester's mentor meeting time (again, we spend 70% of our time discussing when to meet next). We then had sub-group updates from marketing, finite elements, construction, and outreach. The marketing team has finished the marketing team objectives and is looking into non-profits we can get in contact with. We also need to focus on how we're going to make our box economically competitive. The finite elements team planned on checking the model after the meeting. Matt found how to track one point in the model so it can be compared with the experimental group’s findings. Kudos to Matt! The construction team discussed their materials which include Styrofoam sheets and adhesive nails. Outreach is still working on a team to bring in high school students to the lab.

I'll spare you the boring parts about our Undergraduate Research Day poster improvements [Team FRESH: reference the notes in GroupSpaces for the dets]. We decided to still try to work on a concept paper, as we think it would be very beneficial to publish it. By the end of the semester, we hope to have a final, albeit very rough, draft.

Also, Ohene if you're reading this, we discussed maybe having you post on the blog... Get excited!

22 days to Undergraduate Research Day and counting,

Amina