This week ElectroFlow completed a successful Preliminary Design Review with an audience of engineers and project managers at Arthrex headquarters in Naples, FL! This experience was greatly beneficial to our team, as it provided much clarification on more specific aspects of our project and allowed us to receive feedback on our current project plan and established structures. Find more details about our trip below!
Well we’re approaching the end of Phase 1 of our project: the Preliminary Design Review! On Sunday 10/12, all 7 team members will be traveling to Naples, FL to meet our liaison (Coleman), Arthrex clinicians, other Arthrex engineers and co-op students, and project management staff. We will be given a tour of the facilities, a clinical demonstration of current and related Arthrex surgical devices, but most importantly, we will be presenting our current design ideas and how we have come up with them. This is a critical point for the direction of our project, as the feedback we receive will go a long way to provide clarity for our first prototype iteration. We are excited to meet the Arthrex team!
We spent multiple days in the lab this week to discuss and rank design ideas for our initial prototype iterations. These images show some team members opening up and analyzing the component and system-design of a comparative product to our team’s. We did this to generate concepts that would be featured in our Decision Matrices which helped us choose our ideas.
On Tuesday 10/7/25, we gave a practice PDR which was reduced in size and meant for the purpose of peer review. In attendance was 3 other IPPD teams who provided us with feedback, an IPPD staff member who scored and coordinated our presentation delivery, and our coach, Shuo Wang, who was there to confirm our preparedness for the actual PDR the following week. The presentation was great, and we received great feedback on where to improve with the presentation before we head to Naples.
We had one final meeting with Coleman, or liaison, before heading to Naples. In that meeting, we confirmed some figures that we are preparing to present, received clarification on our Design Traceability Matrix, and discussed the logistics of our trip. Overall, the team is ready to meet everyone in Naples and receive good perspective on our next steps. After the trip, we will move into project phase 2: Building!
This week, our team has been focused on three major project aspects:
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.
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.
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!
Our group had our first meetings with the coach and liaison, and they were a success! We were able to get any misconceptions about the project’s expectations cleared up, and we are set up to have a continuous stream of communication between all parties! We are all very excited to dive into the nitty-gritty parts of the project, and in class, this was helped by the Brain Walking activity that was taught to us by a visiting engineering-education faculty member! This practice helped us understand more about our own projects and see where each team member stood in terms of their comprehension of the scope of work. We are also unveiling a new and improved logo that is now on this webpage!
Our team has kicked off research on the project sponsored by Arthrex, which challenges us to explore how a saline pump can be added to an RF probe! We’ve been working together to line up meeting times with both our liaison and our coach, and making sure everyone stays connected and on track. Beyond diving into the technical details, we’ve also had some fun building our identity by designing a team logo and choosing a name that represents who we are; you can see it here on this blog!