Difference between revisions of "Team:Edinburgh/Design"
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Revision as of 13:09, 9 September 2015
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Design
Overview
Over the course of the summer we talked to potential end users, NGO’s, political representatives and academics about their opinion on our device. We wanWhat they wanted out of it and how they saw our device being implemented in our society. These conversation really helped us evolve our designs and come with the simple but elegant design we have right now.
Another big part of our design process was trying to computationally model how our biosensor will behave and helping us understand where are design might lack. Our early conversations made us realise for our biosensor to be better than the current methods , it will have to be easy to use, portable cheap to manufacture and having it paper based was the answer to that.
Prototype 1
Once we decided on to use paper-based biosensor we set out to talk to more people. //link A talk with Susan Deacon made us realise we will need to have multiple tests on one strip, That’s when we found inspiration in the design made by //reference *George Whiteside’s lab for a glucose biosensor*. In this design we would have channels of paper where water will diffuse separated by a hydrophobic material like wax or plastics.
But there was one problem with this design, The distribution of the solution was not uniform #which really created some problems.
Prototype 2
We brainstormed and tried to make our biosensor a bit more simple so that we could have uniform distribution throughout the strip and we came up with this design. This strip would have been of the size of a microscope slide. The Strips you see in centre of the biosensor would again be kept apart by a hydrophobic material and the biosensor would be places inside them.
Although this design meant we could easily predict the diffusion of the liquid as it was all uniform, it did not do well in concentrating the colour produced at one place. It was just too spread out. //Modelling movie
Prototype 3
With the help of our modelling efforts it did not take us long come up with a new solution. Just make some cavities in the design we had that would contain the colour produced.
At this time we really did think we had a winner, but //link talking to more experts made us realise somewhere we could push ourself even more. Reducing the amount of liquid used as the end users might not want to waste a lot of their drug. Although this design only used about 150µl of solution we felt we could do better
Final Biosensor Design
At this time we looked at some our older designs and that when we came up with our current design. This strip only required a tenth of the solution we were using before Uniform distribution, concentrated colours and minimalistic liquid requirements, it has it all.
We were not done yet though, //link A talk with Adam Winstoke gave us the idea that we could increase the ease of use and reliability of results by making a smartphone application and we set out a goal to make that happen
Completing the Device
As soon as we started thinking on this idea we realised there were some hurdles that had to be overcome. For the results to be accurate the picture had to be in a fixed position. Also we needed to control the amount of light that the photo is taken in. The camera had to be positioned at a height more than the minimum focal length as well. At the same time we had to be true to our original intentions of ease of use, cost-effectiveness and portability.