“I don’t like cats, I like human beings”
Our team spent the day at the hotel to compile and document the information we have collected over the past two weeks. We broke up into our respective groups: Kiosk & Website, Bio Engineering, and Social Issues. We worked in these groups for approximately 4 hours and then met as a whole for about 2 hours. Following are the main findings and summaries for each group.
The Kiosk & Website Team (Aaron, Jon, Anthony, Jimmy) discussed the technological obstacles they encountered in their time here and how to best prepare for them for next year. Additionally, they had met with Sister Purity and some other doctors to discuss the layouts and information within their programs. Their major achievement in the past two weeks was successfully sending their first patient’s data from the kiosk to the website with the proper format.
The bioengineering team (Dr. Butler, Dr. Slattery, Brittany, Mike P, Mike F, Stefanie, and Katie W) met and evaluated each instrument used in Mashavu. The designs were revised under different categories based on the information collected from the three testing sites: CYEC students, CYEC community and Mweiga. The evaluation consisted of user and operator interaction with each device, the transition from PSU to Kenya and problems the instruments had to face including hygiene issues. The document composed was very thorough in order to guide next year’s junior design class and also to help evaluate and give feedback to the social/education team and the web team.
The social and education team (Julia, Renee, Katie B, James, Chanda, Sara) worked on compiling the information we had from different conversations with the community members. One of our major findings was the lack of understanding of preventative healthcare. Many people often go to the doctors only when they have major illnesses. For Mashavu to work well in the community there would need to be education on preventative healthcare. We also discussed following up with many contacts we had made over the past weeks in the community including former nurses, pharmacist, and current doctors. Additionally we discussed issues the next team of Mashavu students may want to research in order to prepare themselves for their time in Africa including the definition of poor and other examples of telemedicine working. Our documentation was very extensive and thorough to help students next year understand the social issues and the need for education.
After our hard work, we decided to go to Banana Leaf, a local dance club. We had the opportunity to meet several locals and explain our purpose for our visit while experiencing Kenyan nightlife.
On Sunday we continued our meeting to compile the collected information. We discussed what needed to be finished for our upcoming and final week here in Nyeri. We feel we have made major improvements since day one, but there is still plenty of work to do for our next week.
