Hello! After a very busy three weeks moving across the country and starting GMI in Costa Rica, I’m very excited to start my internship at Johnson & Johnson Center for Device Innovation in Houston and explore my new city!
The program started two weeks ago with a brief orientation and then jetting off to San Jose, Costa Rica on Monday night. We spent the first week at Intel, participating in a medical device design boot camp with local students from the University of Costa (UCR), the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (TEC), and the National University of Costa Rica (UNA). The goal of the week was to develop a low-fidelity prototype for a given need statement. Aedan and I led our team of 4 Costa Rican students in finding a way to minimize the manual dexterity required for elderly people to floss their teeth without caregiver assistance. While this need was easy to understand and relate to, there are many options currently on the market that attempt to solve this problem, so it was challenging to come up with novel designs.
Our team went through the entire design process within a few days, including market analysis, failure modes and effects analysis, intellectual property strategy, clinical regulatory strategy, and more. It was extremely fast-paced, but it was exciting to brainstorm and collaborate with students of different backgrounds and perspectives. In the end, we built a prototype called HiloBite (“floss” in Spanish is “hilo dental”) that held the thread in a horizontally-oriented device that users could bite down on in order to floss their teeth. It also included a comfortable grip and a strap to minimize the grip strength that would be required from elderly patients. Our team had a very rewarding experience participating in the group activities, learning about the design process, and collaborating on our design challenge.
Over the weekend, we had a retreat at Manuel Antonio, the national park on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. We all enjoyed time relaxing on the beach, eating fresh seafood, and enjoying the pura vida lifestyle that all Costa Ricans promote. On Sunday, we went on a nature hike through the national park where we saw native sloths, monkeys, lizards, bats, and insects. I was so impressed that our guide was able to spot these animals way up in trees or dozens of yards away! When we got back to San Jose, we took a tour of UCR and got ice cream with some of the students. We also learned about the Costa Rican healthcare system from Luis, a GMI alumnus, to prepare for our hospital observation during the coming week.
During our second week in Costa Rica, we took a course about clinical needs finding taught by Dr. Paul Fearis. We learned about insight informed innovation, which is defined as utilizing in-context observation to determine needs and gaps which could be improved by medical innovation. It was a very structured process, but it seems like a sound way to make sure that you are designing towards a need that actually exists in a manner that will be useful and easily adopted. So often innovation is driven by a small subset of the population or developed in a way that is not convenient for stakeholders, but Dr. Fearis’ process seeks to ensure that our designs won’t suffer these pitfalls.
On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to observe in the ICU with two TEC students at Hospital Mexico, one of the best public hospitals in Costa Rica. The differences between this hospital and that of the US were stark – for example, the ICU was the first department to be implementing electronic medical records two months ago, something that is a mainstay across most US hospitals. We observed routine maintenance procedures in the ICU, including the care of a burn patient. This process took one nurse almost an hour to complete and has to be done every two hours. Using this observation, on Thursday, we developed a mind map, clinical needs, and need clusters that could be prioritized and analyzed to become full-scale design projects. I’m excited to implement the strategies I learned in this course during my observations at TMC this summer.
This trip was an amazing start to the program, and I’m eager to see where the rest of it will take me. While I’ll miss the Costa Rican food (especially the plantains), hanging out with the other GMI students, and exploring the beautiful biodiversity Costa Rica has to offer, I’m excited to start my internship this week and explore all that Houston has to offer!
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