New to Football, Challenge Accepted- Vania N., OrthoDocs

As time has progressed and we are now in the month of February, I am still learning more on the sport of football. When my team and I decided on designing an injury prevention device for shoulder football injuries, all of us knew nothing about the sport. So it has been our job to understand the background of football before designing a device because we need to be able to understand the shoulder anatomy and the way that the most common shoulder injuries occur before designing a product.

Having to brainstorm different designs for shoulder gear has been quite a challenge since our team has had to try and grasp how the game is executed, the rules involved, and the gear that the players wear at a game. Before we started drafting out our proposal, we took notes on the anatomy of the shoulder and we decided on specific parts of the shoulder that we wanted to have as focal points in the design. One of the focal points in the shoulder, (WebMD),  would have to be the rotator cuff which is a group of tendons and muscles that allows great range of motion; so if the rotator cuff where to be injured, the athlete would have physical restrictions until cleared by their doctor.

Another focal point that we decided on having was the bursae, (NCBI),  which are sacs filled with fluid that help reduce friction between adjacent moving bones. The reason why our team chose having the bursae as a focal point was because if the bursae were to be damaged, there wouldn’t be any natural protection for the shoulder.

At the moment, our team is working on editing our proposal as well as revisiting our customer interviews to ask further questions that will allow us to innovate our designs. For our proposal, we are going to go back and look at any revisions/suggestions provided by our Biomedical Innovations teacher, Ella M. As for customer interviews, we plan on having further in depth conversations with the students we have interviewed; we want more elaboration from the students to be able to understand what they need as players and why.

I personally feel that having gone into the project without having knowledge of football and being at the point where my team is at now is really good and I feel proud of the things we have accomplished so far. There definitely could be more communication in between members and even more discussions outside of class to try and be prepared for the things that are to come. This project has been great so far and I can’t wait until we are further into the project because it’s really interesting to be able to look back at the first semester and apply the gained knowledge from our mistakes onto the project. Overall, my team is doing great and we are soon going to have a discussion of what it seems that the athletes need in order to be able to have high performance in their games while also preventing injuries that might constrain them.

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