I got to Costa Rica on May 23rd around noon. Tori, Izzie, and Charlie were also arriving around that time so luckily we were able to meet up at the airport and coordinate Uber rides. It took so long for us to find the pickup spot at the airport when all of us were carrying heavy suitcases. On our way to Selina, it was pouring so bad outside and the drivers on the road including ours were driving so wildly and fast that we almost hit a pedestrian twice. (As the days went by I realized that Costa Rica has very nice weather unlike my first impression. It was cooler than I expected and it is sunny most of the time except for a few hours of rain in the afternoon.)
We started our Needs Finding Workshop right away the day after. We were split into a few groups to do a rotation of visiting some hospitals here. Erin, Charlie, Madison, and I were put into the same group. Our first visit was to the Hospital Nacional de Niños, which is a public children’s hospital. A doctor greeted us and showed us all around the hospital which was nice. The hospital had pretty old facilities and there was a lot of clutter like wheelchairs and medical devices sitting around the hallways because they were running out of spaces to store them. The doctor explained some medical devices they were using and one of the devices they had, which was a leg sustaining device for rehabilitation purposes, was made for adults so they couldn’t really use it especially to small children. The hospital overall seemed that it needed a renovation (and the doctor told us they are building a new building) and some of the devices were looking outdated (Our team searched up on the leg device later which is called CPM device, and apparently people were not using it anymore because it has minimal benefits).
The rehabilitation room in the children’s hospital
The second hospital we went to in the afternoon was Clinica Biblica ER, a private hospital. Because it was private, they were protecting the patients’ privacy so we didn’t get to explore that much as we did in the children’s hospital. The doctor almost just made us sit in the waiting room so we went up to the reception desk and asked the worker a few questions about how the insurance system works here and the overall system in this hospital. We also wanted to talk to the nurses but didn’t get the chance to unfortunately.
The day after in the morning we visited our final hospital, National Hospital of Geriatrics and Gerontology. Personally I felt I learned the most here; an engineer guided us around the hospital and explained how their devices work, and we even got to observe the OR. The rehabilitation room was especially impressive to me. There were way more different kinds of devices and therapies that are used to help patients’ movement than I thought. Some devices had some issues such as the magnetic patches that are attached to the patients’ body being too heavy. In the OR, we observed two surgeries: one for the cataract and the other one for the prostate. I expected the atmosphere in the OR to be very depressing and all the medical workers there to be very focused on their jobs, but some nurses were on their phones and they had music turned on in the room. We were asking some questions to the doctors while they were on their surgery and they seemed to be pretty chill about it. They told us both of the surgeries are not painful for the patients and only take less than an hour. Being able to learn about all the medical devices and facilities on site was a great opportunity for me as someone who wants to work in the medical device field in the next few years. I wish I had more medical knowledge enough to understand everything the doctors and engineers explained, but it still was a great experience.
After two days of clinical visits, the medical innovation bootcamp started. It was a 8-5 session held for three days with Costa Rican students across six universities. We were set up in teams with 3-4 Costa Rican students based on the projects we chose, and my team’s project was designing a device that detects foot ulcers for diabetic patients. Luckily, all of my teammates were hardworking and spoke English so I didn’t have that much trouble communicating with them. To be honest, the first day was pretty exhausting since most of the activities were lecture based going over through the Engineering Design Process, which all of Rice students including me already knew about before coming here. I was able to enjoy the second day better, getting to prototype our device which was a thermal camera inserted box where you can put your foot on top. The camera will scan the underneath of the foot as well as between the toes to detect if there are any signs of inflammation, which indicates foot ulcer. We especially focused on targeting patients who have restrictive mobility: our device had a stick attached to the box so the patients can use it as a selfie-stick to control the device easily, and also a toe separating rubbers that helps scan between the toes. The bootcamp was overall a great learning experience to me, not only about the medical background knowledge and engineering design process of the project but also working as a team with people from different backgrounds.
My teammates and I during the bootcamp
Our low-fidelity prototype