During our visit to Perkins, we were given a tour of their museum - a collection of organ models, taxidermied animals, and historical artifacts.

This is an area of vision impairment in education that we hadn't considered before, but found extremely helpful and interesting.

Perkins insight

Visiting Perkins and seeing its approach to understanding animals through taxidermy was something we hadn’t considered. It got us thinking; for sighted people, understanding anatomy and biology can be as simple as visually interpreting diagrams.

However, blind and low-vision communities can’t feel someone’s stomach or lungs in action.

Anatomy without

access

make this into a thesis slide

Precedents

Pumping heart

Prior nuvu project

Lung inflation model

Generic

Schedule patches

Perkins school for the blind

Functional requirements

؜Must have a realistic tactile feel

Functional requirements

؜Must have a realistic tactile feel

Must be at a set scale to a real organ

Functional requirements

؜Must have a realistic tactile feel

Must be at a set scale to a real organ

Must be accurately shaped

Sketches

"There are 300 million alveoli in just this section"

Sketches cont

Alveoli Expansion Lo-Fi

1. ؜Simple manifold translating 1 input in multiple
2. Technical basis for future precedent

bullet points here & on other slides

؜This lofi prototype focused on modeling the scale that these would be at in real life.

This is a model that is created via lasercutting many parts with slots, in this case, out of cardboard and wood, then interlocking them.

Scale model

1. Created to get feedback on the scale of both the organs, but also how many organs
2. Feedback noted we should only focus on the lung and not the alveoli or diaphragm as well to focus on

Lung cast

؜

1. First attempt at casting a hollow lung with silicone in a 3d printed mold
2. Ended up underfilled, although the fundamentals of the methodology would work if the implementation were better.

The basis for the molds that we would end up using later, we kept it extremely simple, but notably, this one lacked ample air ventilation.

Lung cast mold

Alveoli Hi-Fi

1. Molding technique known as "roto-molding" in which you put in enough silicone to spread around the surface and then rotate it
2. Failed, as we used a drill to achieve this in lieu of an electric turntable which experienced voltage drop and stopped working

Talk about how we learned and in thsi one did a sort of silicone based injection molding full page image

Final prototype

Reflection and next steps