So far our team has encountered little to no problems during the start of our DAP project. Since the last post done by Anabel we have gotten farther into our preliminary design proposal. Also in class today we had a little meeting with Ms. Meisner to talk about and look over our customer design matrix to fix some areas and find ways on how we can test some of the customer needs like mobility and comfort. Our main goal during this process is to be able to communicate well to get everything done on time and correctly.
Using the design reference we ordered, we were able to get to see first hand what was good and what we felt might need to be changed. Like I stated before we used our experiences to create our customer design matrix, while doing this we all agreed that comfort, mobility, breathability, adjustability and affordability were all very important. While talking about our day with the device we all stated that it sometimes restricted some movements of the knee, for example going up the stairs was a bit painful because the sleeve was a bit too tight.
Today in class we broke up the proposal so we could each take a part and try and do it on our own. I think that this process will really help us stay on track and allow us to ask each other questions on our part if we get stuck at some point.
Since the knee can be associated with many different types of injuries we are constantly looking for statistics to back up our information. One statistic we found was that there are about 150,000 ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) injuries occurring in the US every year according to the American Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine. Many things can cause a bad knee injury but most of them all originate from the same problem which is rotation of the knee. We learned earlier that the knee joint is a hinge joint meaning
it is not able to perform rotation, so the fact that some people do have some extent of rotation in the knee is very bad. The University of California in San Francisco stated that after a knee surgery it is possible to have complications with the knee stiffness and anterior knee pain. Through this design for a knee injury prevention design we hope to prevent injuries so that people won’t have to worry about knee complications in the future.
Overall I feel we are working well and are getting things done. Sometimes we do have our off task moments but we all come back to the researching and pick up right where we left off. We are all really good at listening to each others ideas and collaborating to make a fantastic product, for example our logo looks pretty amazing.
StarPathDesign 
I really enjoyed reading this, I like how you added that statistic into your post. It lets us know just how important knee injuries should be avoided considering that 150,000 knee ligament injuries occur every year.I would have liked to be able to see your logo since you brought it up, and don’t worry I feel like my group can get off task at times as well.But its good to take small breaks and then get right back to the task at hand. Keep up the good work! (: -Apolonia V.
I enjoyed reading your post about the knee because my group as well is doing the knee, so it was nice to hear how the other groups process is going. I liked reading about the statistics that you had in the post because it helped to see why this is such a big issue. When reading about your experience with the knee brace, it made me look back at my groups because we said the same thing about the brace not helping much with the knee rotation and the brace was uncomfortable. I would have liked to see your logo considering you said it was nice but I can’t wait to see your group’s final product. Good luck, keep up the good work.
Savannah, I thought that your blog post was great and it described how your team was doing in detail. I think that having talked about knee brace altogether when everyone had used it was very beneficial towards your design matrix and has allowed you to make reat executive decisions based off of the observations. It’s great to know that everything has been going good so far and no problems have been encountered yet. -Vania N.