Second workshop
Exactly half a year after our kick-off workshop, we organized our second full-day workshop where we concentrated our efforts to work on our tasks for EnHands. We worked in the following groups:
- Mechanical team
- Marketing team
- Financial planning
- Trip planning
The mechanical team split up into two groups that worked on the cosmetic and on the functional hand. For the cosmetic hand, we started our first experiments with silicon molding: the week before the workshop, we had 3D-printed a mold and ordered silicone, so now we were ready to manufacture some hands. The design consists of a 3D-printed support around which we mold the silicone. This worked surprisingly well, however the fingers were quite flexible and we are planning to improve this with a different type of silicone in future iterations.
For the functional hand, we put together the parts we had previously printed and improved the prototype's ratchet mechanism: some parts that looked good in CAD drawing turned out to not function optimally in the real world, which we could modify to make the ratchet mechanism work much better.
The marketing team took care of the creation of this blog for our website, the maintenance of our Instagram account and the organisation of a public event we want to host in the future. We are planning a talk, potentially followed by panel discussion, about amputations and hand prostheses in developing countries with Dr. Viquar Qureshi as our main speaker. The goal is to inform and raise awareness about the difficulties that come with an amputated hand, and present our idea of an affordable hand protheses, but also to make our group known to more students and motivate potential new members to join us.
The finances team put together an updated pitch presentation and looked into financing options. Furthermore, a small group started the planning for a trip to India we would like to do with a group of EnHands members in the future to try out our prostheses and get an idea of the situation of amputees in person.
In conclusion, we think it was a very successful workshop day! We could see that we have already come a long way since our kickoff workshop, and our prototypes are starting to take form. Since working together for a full day was very effective and also lots of fun, we decided to hold such workshops more often in the future.