ME Product Design Capstone
Kevin Grospitch, Mike Ciccone, Justin Taylor & Adam Rukin
Spring 2017
Emergency Response Safety:
The scope of our project is to design a product to help improve first responder safety in an emergency situation. Our focus is on ease of use, speed of deployment, elevated safety, and cost effectiveness for the public sector.
LED Vests
Prototype 1:
This prototype’s purpose is to let the user be more visible when desired by turning on LEDs attached to the vest, and be less visible when desired by turning the LEDs off. LED’s will have adjustable brightness.This prototype is designed to be easily put on over current equipment being worn and still be able to meet its purpose.
Prototype 2:
This prototype’s purpose is to let the user be more visible when desired by turning on leds attached to the vest, and be less visible when desired by turning the LEDs off. LED’s will have adjustable brightness. This prototype is designed to provide more visibility than the first prototype but at a cost of flexibility with current equipment being worn by user.
Traffic Cones
Prototype 1:
The prototype’s purpose is to make traffic cones more visible and portable in order to more effectively establish a boundary between vehicles and an emergency situation. The LEDs are placed on the wire helix, which folds down onto the base. The base has an on/off switch and both solar cells and light sensors in order to adjust the LED brightness to the current light levels.
Prototype 2:
The prototype’s purpose is to make traffic cones more visible and portable in order to more effectively establish a boundary between vehicles and an emergency situation. The LEDs are placed on the wire helix, which folds down into the hole in the base. The base has an on/off switch and both solar cells and light sensors in order to adjust the LED brightness to the current light levels.
Emergency Barrier
Prototype 1: Emergency situations require experienced and trained personnel to respond to developing environments where boundaries are changing and remain undefined. The prototype’s purpose is to better define the working environment using physical barriers to outline and notify all in the vicinity. The use of LED strobes and extension lines connecting multiple vertical barrier accomplishes this goal to elevate safety by increasing visibility and awareness of ongoing scenes.
Prototype 2: The purpose of the deployable LED barrier with custom designed track is to house the entire device in an easy to maneuver unit. A motor would be included inside the housing to automate the deployment and retraction of the barrier. The length of the barrier would be adjustable per situation and can be made smart by alarming responders if the track line is breached in an emergency situation.
Door Stops
Prototype 1:
When entering a building, either commercial or residential, firefighters may come across heavy doors that close automatically. Additionally, flashover is a constant threat, especially in residential buildings where most of the materials are flammable. To combat both of these problems, a prototype was developed that can be quickly deployed to hold the door open. It has an integrated temperature sensor that will detect a rapid increase in temperature (signalling a chance of flashover) and sound an alarm so that any firefighters still in the room can exit as fast as possible. The middle consists of two sections that come apart and retract via a spring to allow it to hook onto the door hinge plates.
Prototype 2: The main difference between the two prototypes is the placement and shape of the hooks. This second prototype is designed to be easier to hook onto the door hinges.
Team Reflection:
When making the sketch prototypes, we learned that scale is very important when attempting to convey a prototype’s functionality. Having a 1:1 scale is not as important as using the available materials to accurately convey the functionality relative to the rest of the prototype. However, functionality overall is difficult to achieve when we’re using duct tape and cardboard, but it’s not as difficult as it sounds to accurately convey how a product would be used and how it would work, even if it is just visual. The material chosen can help illustrate a product’s use, but having the right material is not vital at this stage.
For the vest prototypes, there is little in the design to be changed besides the size of the vest (as it is not built to scale) and how the LEDs work. On the other hand, its simple design could be an advantage for us in the design process. There is a need and market for the vest, as expressed by some of the officers we talked to earlier. One reservation about this concept is its lack of a true mechanical design. Most of the technical work will be done with the LEDs in regards to how they are activated and how their brightness level will be adjusted. The ease of use of the vest needs to be addressed in the next round of prototyping.
For the cone prototypes, the current designs seem simplistic, and perhaps not smart enough to truly implement for the course of this project. We’re doubtful that the prototype solves a prevalent need, and the fact that there are some current market solutions that are similar in functionality means that our design needs to be more innovative than it currently is in order to have the desired impact. Although the current traffic cones have not been innovated on in years, the current design needs improvement in the next round of prototyping. The idea is that the cones improve both the ease of storage and increase visibility, which are both addressed in this round.
The door stop prototype is functional for holding light doors open, which shows that the idea is headed in the right direction. Deployability and ease of use will be the main features that need to be improved on in the coming rounds of prototyping. Ideally, we would make the doorstops (and thus doorways) visible in smoky rooms by using lasers or strong lighting, but the validity of laser/light visibility in smoky rooms still needs to be tested.
The barrier prototypes are modular in architecture in order to help adopt to changing environments, thus making them effective in any situation. We have some doubts with the first round of prototyping, as the current designs may not meet our ease of use and deployability metrics. This should be addressed in the next round of prototyping.