My Digital Sketchbook

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Aware Bandage

The Aware-Bandage is a device for assisting people and patients for whom excessive bleeding is a concern.

My grandmother started having problems with the dialysis port in her arm. At random, the artery attached to the port would open and blood would pour out. Usually, it would take minutes before she (or another individual) realized that she was bleeding profusely. Our main concern was that she may have one of these episodes during a nap or while asleep in the middle of the night. If my grandmother did happen to wake up during the bleeding, she may be too weak to call upon a family member for help. The thought that her port could open up while sleeping consumed her. My biggest fear was finding her in a pool of blood the next morning. Neither one of us got much sleep until the problem with her artery was remedied.

That is when the idea for the aware-bandage came to my mind. If there was a device that could alert us as soon as excessive bleeding started, both she and I could rest without the thought of death looming over our head.

The Aware Bandage is made of plastic and is placed around a dressed wound encompassing the entire dressing. The wireless chip and all other working components (minus the moisture sensor) are placed on the outside of the plastic sleeve in a sealable pocket. The moisture sensor is placed on the inside of the sleeve (the signal is transmitted through the sleeve with conductive plastic. Hopefully this will not electrocute the patient. I will need to look into this.)

If using inside a home, the patient (and/or caretaker) would place an alarm(s) by his/her bedside. If the patient’s wound opened or leaked excessively, the leeds on the moisture sensor would close, sending a signal to the wireless chip to sound the alarm.

If using at a hospital or nursing home where multiple patients needed to be watched, a tagging system using a replaceable UPC code located on the outside of the sleeve could be implemented, allowing nurses to pinpoint which patient needs immediate attention.

The Aware Bandage needs to satisfy the following requirements:
1) Inexpensive
2) disposable moisture sensor
3) moisture sensor must be kept separate from other components
4) moisture sensor must be sterile
5) reusable wireless alarm system & chip
6) be able to monitor multiple patients from a hub (upc symbols to link patient number to database control unit?)

Ideally, even if the main unit is mildly expensive, all of the parts (except the sleeve and moisture sensor) are reusable.

The Aware Bandage can be used in hospitals, nursing homes and private care recovery. It will improve the quality of life of both the patient and caregiver by reducing stress levels associated with the need to constantly monitor a dressing. It will allow post-op patients to get much needed rest without having to have their bandage checked for leakage by a nurse every hour (which saves the nurse some time as well). If there is excessive bleeding, the Aware Bandage also prevents blood from getting everywhere by containing it in the plastic sleeve. The patient does not need to have his or her bedding or clothes changed, saving everyone from an unnecessary annoyance.

After researching a bit I discovered that there are a few patents out dealing with moisture sensors, but in all of the patent examples, the sensors are measuring levels of water in soil. The inventor states that his idea could be applied to uses in bandages, but he does not further explain as to how he would do so. All together it seemed as if each person was having the same problems – how to keep costs low and the sensor sterile.

Possible problems could include the use of a wireless device to transmit the status of the patient’s Aware Bandage to the hub at the nurses’ station. This may be overridden by having sleeve attached to a base located at patient’s bedside. For home use, I would still like to keep it wireless for ease of movement and sleep.

My Mouse

This was my first crack at taxidermy. I attempted to put him in a dance pose so that he would appear graceful even after death.

All other mice beware!!!!

More Photos
Canida's Mouse Taxidermy Instructables

Who said electronics couldn't be sexy?!?!

This is an electronic card that I created for my friend's birthday. It was made using conductive thread, conductive fabric, L.E.D.s, two 3 V batteries, some construction paper, velcro, and a lot of love and imagination.

When you "take off" his clothes his hands close the circuit and the L.E.D. candles on his birthday cake hat and his man parts light up.

Concepts Explored

Two Venn diagrams showing where my four concepts connect and do not connect with my motivations.

A couple of myconceptsexplored.

DIY: Haptic Mouse Earmuffs

For my HomeX:DIY class I created mouse earmuffs complete with a haptic beating heartbeat.

The earmuffs are made from the hides of approximately 15 white mice and are lined with leather. A motor is in each ear and a small cable connects them to an arduino board. The motors sound and feel like a heartbeat when they vibrate.

Side View:

Front View:

Mouse Disection:

User Testing

Photos of the disection, sewing and breadboard.

Venn Diagrams

Four venn diagrams made while trying to discover what I am interested in.

Download Venn1A.jpg
Download Venn2.jpg
Download Venn3.jpg
Download Venn4.jpg

Some of the questions that came about during this exploration:

How does the physical and/or psychological change when the user is faced with a sensory overload or a sensory deficiency?

Can you get the user to question how and why the physical works when you alter the expected experience?

How can you bring people closer together or separate them further through sensory manipulation?

The Wooden Spoon

The Wooden Spoon is a cooking and lifestyle web site for people and those who are touched by people who are diabetic and suffer from renal failure.

The diet for a hemodialysis patient is quite restrictive: limit phosphorous, potassium, sodium, and liquid intake all while eating an increased amount of protein. 99.9% of the recipes that various medical and kidney associations disperse replace salt with sugar, ignore phosphorous levels in foods and use many simple carbohydrates (which your body turns to sugar). Since over 86% of people diagnosed with renal failure are diabetic and must watch their consumption of sugars and carbohydrates, the recipes provided tend to fail on multiple levels.

To my knowledge, Cooking for David is the only recipe book that covers dialysis recipes that are also diabetic friendly. Cooking for David is not open-sourced and has to be ordered by mail.

When someone is stricken with renal failure, that person (and his/her surrounding family) must immediately change cooking and eating habits. Eating out is virtually impossible. Food becomes bland.

The Wooden Spoon is a free service (hopefully, funding would later come from the National Kidney Association) that is quickly and easily accessible. New recipes are posted daily, are searchable by type (sodium, phosphorous, amount of liquid, etc) and would include QuickTimes showing the user how to prepare the recipe. Tips for watching your levels (i.e., treated water contains sodium, potassium and phosphorous. Check out the websites below and determine which water – your local tap or a certain brand of bottled water – is best), how to change your favorite recipes into dialysis/diabetic friendly recipes (save your old Italian bread to make homemade breadcrumbs. Slice and toast stale bread in an oven to remove excess moisture, then grind or grate. Not only do these breadcrumbs taste better, but they contain approximately 3000 mg less sodium per cup than those sold on store shelves), and easier living while on dialysis (Look at your meals for the day as a whole. You can eat 80% of your daily sodium allowance in one meal, as long as you curb your intake of salt for the remainder of that day) are on the website and a daily tip is sent to you via email or phone.

The user’s account tracks what foods he/she is eating. Consumption and daily counts of common foods and chain restaurant foods can be entered and accessed via mobile or the Internet. What was eaten and its levels are recorded and are later used to help a health care professional properly diagnose or prescribe medication (phosphate blockers, quinine pills).

A blog would provide emotional support as well as feedback on the recipes tried. Requests to turn a non-diet friendly recipe into a diet-friendly recipe are sent to the web master. Users can submit their diet-friendly recipe, which will be analyzed by the site and then officially posted with their dietary counts.

Reedʼs Law says that the value of the network multiples far more rapidly, at the exponential rate of 2N, when human social networks use the technical networks to form social groups.

-Howard Rheingold, Technologies of Cooperation

It is my hope to bring this website and its contents to the forefront of the medical associations that deal with kidney disease (i.e., American Association of Kidney Patients, National Kidney Association) so that families and patients who are faced with this affliction have a free and accurate source of knowledge to help them through a difficult time.

My Web Site Ideas

Download cuz.html

Are We the Web?

Upon first glance at Kevin Kelly’s Wired article We Are the Web, one may nod in agreement with most of what Kelly states. We are witnessing an epoch with the creation of the Internet. Lives are being connected in ways that most could not fathom a short decade ago. However, with a closer inspection and dissection of his article elements of Kelly’s stance begin to fall apart. Below is an illustration of portions of his argument that require careful analysis.

The Role of Blogs

Kelly has an abundance of enthusiasm for one of the Web’s most popular creations, namely, blogs. Undeniably, this enthusiasm is well placed. Blogs are a phenomenon of ever-increasing popularity and allow for a sharing of information between principal and audience on every topic from the war in Iraq to the social happenings at a local junior high school. However, when detailing the blog-explosion he does not account for the fact that with the every growing number of new blogs, there is an accompanying number of dead blogs (i.e., blogs that have been abandoned by their author).

The number of dead blogs doesn’t negate the passion for the medium, but it suggests a more tempered view is appropriate.

In this more tempered view, it would have been worthwhile to discuss the types of blogs that have proven successful and the implications for the future of the web. No doubt blogs will continue to be an important part of the web going forward, but not every blog, and certainly not most of the blogs born every two seconds.

Is the Web for Everyone?

Kelly also shows an unrestrained view of the Web’s social and economic reach. “With the steady advance of new ways to share, the Web has embedded itself into every class, occupation, and region.” This has to be mistaken. Certainly, Kelly is right on his smaller points. Specifically, that the “the Internet [would be] 100 percent male” and that web users would be “out of the mainstream.”

However, his broader claim about how embedded the web has become fails. Kelly does not account for social, economic and geographic inequities.

With regards to geography, Kelly has neglected to take into consideration most of the population in third world countries. Believing that the web has managed to even remotely touch lives in Natitingou, Benin or will within the next ten years is most likely a complete misconception.

In regards to social and economic considerations, a lot of what we see represented on the web is from the perspective of the middle to upper class. Access to the web is still, to some degree, a luxury and the ability to invest leisure time on the web is unquestionably an indulgence not equally shared by all. Some do not have access to a computer or the Internet and even if they do, their time to fully explore and enjoy the Web is much more circumscribed than for others.

Glossing over the inequities that impact web usage and web involvement hides an issue that will resonate on the web over the next decade.

Overly Optimistic

Kevin Kelly is overly optimistic about the Internet’s future ability to counter act new problems. Kelly argues that:

“[B]y 2015 [the Machine] will anticipate disturbances and avoid them. It will have a robust immune system, weeding spam from its trunk lines, eliminating viruses and denial-of-service attacks the moment they are launched, and dissuading malefactors from injuring it again.”

However, there will always be a handful of people at the top of programming that will be one step ahead of the Machine. The viruses these select few create will constantly be coded and executed in a unique way. The Machine may be able to anticipate disturbances and avoid ones they already have encountered, but being able to thwart a completely new virus that is coded quite different from anything it has previously determined to be “viral” is impossible and precisely why the Machine will never be a virus-free, smoothly running operating system.

Kelly’s article supports this conclusion when he states that, “[t]he Machine will take on anything we do more than twice.” Therefore if Kelly is arguing that the machine needs initial exposures to learn and assimilate threats, then so long as top programmers can use that against the machine in developing new viruses and threats, there will be the potential for attacks and viruses beyond the Machine’s capabilities.