I participated in the collaboration between BioHack from the Biomedical Engineering Society and MakeOhio, where the two events involve hardware and creating a solution to any of the posed challenges. My team, Blubber Bread Annihilation Drill, and I decided to tackle the ICU handwashing challenge, one posed by BioHack. In order to create a hand sanitization compliance system, we designed a system that would sense forces on hand sanitization stations and forces on the door handle of hospital patient rooms. Should employees not apply force (using the hand sanitizer) but attempt to open the door (applying force on the door), a disparaging message that discourages such actions will appear on a LCD screen. The installation of force sensors will not require additional adjustments to the hospital building integrity, and will be easily accessible through hand sanitizing stations that have become far more commonplace in a pandemic world. Additionally, our system will count how many people have complied with hand sanitization standards and store such information. This anonymous counting will help preserve privacy and not leak any personal information about the hospital employees and patients. However, there will still be data for analysis and decisions in regards to hand sanitization and hospital management. In this challenge, my team and I spent 48 hours to come up with such a solution, program it into a working prototype, made a video of the system, and answered the questions of the judges. This endeavor employed the use of solution ideation, assembly of circuity, assembly of the prototype structure, and presentation of the solution. We named our product “Clean Hands We Demands.”

It was a great deal of fun, and we especially enjoyed coming up with various discouraging messages and praises to flash on the LCD screen. Additionally, we were able to solve a multitude of problems throughout the process. From troubleshooting the code of the Arduino platform to getting the mess of wires to properly connect and attach to the structure, we found that we had fun with all of it. The people that were able to meet in person, namely myself and Grace Workman, also soldered the LCD on the circuit board. This resolved a problem that was extremely frustrating the first day, namely that we wanted to be able to get by without the soldering, but ultimately we did. Despite a small burn from the solder along my index finger, things worked wonderfully afterwards. Additionally, given that the entire competition was online and did not allow for all team members to be on hand to built and work with the hardware, we had to work with giving clear instructions and dividing up the work in feasible ways so that it could all come together to the physical produce. We were immensely proud of our creation, as it was quite a journey to get it into a working product. In the end, we won second place in the ICU Handwashing Challenge.

The video may be found here: https://youtu.be/uwLg_IIrTvU

Credits to the Team: 

Jenny Yi

Grace Workman

Ikra Anwar