Lily Y. Joint Protection Project

We are currently in the first stages of our DAP project. We have ended up with the phalanges and joints associated with the fingers, as we originally requested, and are in the process of researching devices that already exist in order to protect the fingers. We have found that there are very few articles and other credible sources of information focusing on finger protection. Even if we can’t find many articles, this step in research is very valuable and important because we need to understand how other products work and where they come up short so that we can create a better, more functional product. We have come up with customer interview questions because we can’t make a product protecting the hand of a roller derby player if we don’t know what the customer wants. We have also researched existing products such as the Hillbilly Wrist Guard Gloves:

This is an important part of the research/brainstorm process because we need to know what kind of products are out there currently, and we need to be able to innovate a new product better than the existing products so it has a strong foothold in the market.

Something we did to further our understanding of how the hand works was perform a dissection on a chicken foot. I learned a lot about the anatomy of not only a chicken foot but also the structure of a human hand because there are many similarities. One thing I realized is how close everything is, when I was younger I always thought there was so much space inside of me, but actually seeing how everything, the bones, muscles, tendons, and skin all connect proves how wrong I was when I was little. The similarities I mentioned earlier are things like how the tendons connect to the digits of the chicken foot, when I pulled on the tendons and made the digits move, I could then lift my own fingers and watch how the tendons over my knuckles moved, it was very cool. Both the human hand and chicken foot are made up of numerous different cells and tissues, which is another aspect where they are similar. I definitely had no idea how tendons worked before this dissection but now that I’ve seen them and played with them I have an idea of how to represent them in the model we are working towards making. Overall, even though the chicken foot smelled absolutely terrible, worse than formaldehyde, I really enjoyed the dissection, it was informative and I learned a lot about how my own hands work.

That is the Joint Protection Project’s current progress, thank you for your interest. More updates to come!