![Image of surgically implanted hip implant [7]](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/b0796662-660c-4610-826c-056d2cb1c279/anterior-hip-replacement_1323440330-scaled.jpeg)
<aside> 💡 During the second design project of the semester, my group and I were tasked with designing a hip implant for our patient Dr. Uhura Nyota. A professor with an active lifestyle whom is diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a hip joint disease that causes the degradation of cartilage in the hip leading to the undesired bone to bone contact. She suffers from constant throbbing feet and hip pain, as a result of her low white blood cell count causing her arthritis. Dr. Uhura has already undergone treatments in the form of Prednisone and is currently on Remicade, both proving to have no significant use. One vital issue with our patient is that she is allergic to metallic products, thus, my groups objective is to design a metal free hip implant that will be able to resemble a normal hip eliminating the bone to bone contact.
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Image of surgically implanted hip implant [7]
The first milestone of the second design project presented everyone with a fresh start and new group mates. As my group mates and I acquainted ourselves, we went over our previous roles for design project 1, and assigned our roles. This is where we decided that I would be the subject matter of this project. Furthermore, we split up into two separate sub teams, modelling and computing. This is where I joined the computing team, as I sought to add more computing skills to my already very elementary knowledge of coding.
As per usual, we wasted no time and jumped right into the contents of this design project. Our patient Dr. Uhura Nyota was introduced to my group and our objective was to identify the type of disease she had. After a careful study of the CT scans and her profile, we determined that Dr. Uhura had rheumatoid arthritis. Following the patient’s diagnosis, we listed out our objectives and constraints in preparation of our need statement. This would outline all of the goals and objectives we would need to meet during this project. I feel that this milestone went quite smoothly as I was able to understand my weaknesses from the last design project and turn them into strengths for this one. The need statement was much easier to make compared to the first one, and the team spirit and morale were much higher in that everyone had an open mind coming in and was listening to everyone’s opinions.
Before coming into Design Studio for week 8 we were required to do some preliminary concept sketching of a prototype, so that we would be able to come together with our ideas to hopefully form an idea of our ideal prototype. I found this task quite difficult since there was a standard hip implant structure for the entirety of the market. I focused my design more on novelty, thus I decided to give magnet’s a shot between the femoral head and hip in hopes of simulating the lost cartilage, while keeping the smooth movement like real joints.
chann47_DP2_Milestone2 (2).pdf
Milestone 2 brought my group together to share our previously done concept sketches, we all had quite different ideas which was advantageous in having many sketches to work off of. We each went around pitching our ideas and concepts of the prototype, and then we gave each other feedback both positive and negative. After doing so, we gathered all of our thoughts and listed out every strength of each of our designs. This is when we came up with our refined concept sketch, after reminding ourselves of our need statement we came up with a biomembrane embedded ball and socket mechanism.
This milestone expressed how communication and being open-minded can lead to greater success, as the discussion we held was very professional and enabled everyone to express their opinions and concerns.