This week, our team has been focused on three major project aspects:

PDR Presentation

In just about 1 week, our team will be headed to Naples, FL to deliver the Preliminary Design Review to Arthrex employees (both clinical and engineering)! We are in the midst of preparing a presentation of our design considerations and ideas. The goal of the presentation is to receive feedback on which concepts our design will be feasible (both in functionality and testing) and which will not. As you can see below, the presentation will be via PowerPoint, and we will divide the delivery among the team members. This upcoming Tuesday, 10/7, our team will be delivering a mock PDR presentation (shortened) to our IPPD class and coach in lecture. This will be another great way to receive feedback before our main presentation on 10/13.

Design Architecture

This week, we also completed a product architecture schematic. This helped us identify each physical component of the design we will be developing and the interactions between them. This included a physical component schematic, a table of component features, a clustered component overview, fundamental and incidental interactions of components, a 3D diagram (pictured below), and a narrative on changes in our approach from concept generation.

Design Traceability Matrix

As a part of the Arthrex product design standards, a design traceability matrix is required for any new device in development. Our company liaison sent us a document template and guided us through the proper use of this technical strategy document. As you can see below, the document highlights user needs and categorizes design inputs based on those user needs. For the protection of IP, we have not published items from this document. However, the template can be seen below.

Week 4 is in the book! We have secured our travel to Naples to visit Arthrex in the middle of October; we’re very excited to meet the engineers and explain our project! Furthermore, we have received probes from Smith and Nephew, who are a competitor to Arthrex, to help us start visualizing what a final product will be. We also have access to Arthrex i90 probes, so some of our ideas on ergonomics can be confirmed. A lot of discussion has been done by us about our concept generation and the new project timeline; we feel that the intermittent deliverables are starting to materialize!

Our group made more strides this week: we had another meeting with our liaison, and we were able to clarify plenty of points about our project, especially how we will validate our project and timelines. Furthermore, we will likely be traveling to Naples to visit the Arthrex HQ in the middle of October, look out for more details on this blog! We will also be receiving some devices from them along with Solidworks and Altium files, we can’t wait to work with them! Our goals are to finish up our PDS and project timelines, on our next blog you’ll see more details about them!