My name is Craig Milroy.
I’m one of the Co-Directors of the Product Realization Lab at Stanford.
And I’m Ian Connolly.
I'm a former graduate student of engineering and current med student at Stanford University.
Ian, I heard you’ve done a project that’s gotten a lot of attention is very important.
Can you tell me about it?
Sure.
So our project was to create a low-cost and very easy to use clubfoot brace –
And basically clubfoot is a congenital birth defect where a child’s feet are turned downward
and inward making it very difficult for them to walk and it’s a huge problem in developing
countries because the bracing phase of treatment is very expensive or the braces they have
available to them are very difficult to use.
Did you find this project yourself or how did you come about doing that particular project?
So we started working on this project through a course at Stanford called Design for Extreme
Affordability and you know it was really born out of that class and we’ve continued to
work on it using the resources here at the PRL for the past 2 or so years.
This seems like a big project.
Were you working with a team or were you doing it yourself?
Yeah, so we were part of – I was part of a student team of 4, -
Jeff Yang, a PhD student, Mike Adhoot, a medical student, and Katie Jaxheimer, a business school
student.
So how do you tackle a problem like that?
What steps did you take to try to come up with a solution?
Sure, so I mean I guess the first thing we did was we did a lot of need finding around
this problem, this issue, and after we sort of honed in on the problem that we wanted
to solve we came up with different questions that we sought to answer via prototyping,
answering them via physical means.
Can you talk about the prototyping stages a little bit more?
Sure.
So the first set of questions that we came up with during the prototyping process were
very basic questions.
We had never built anything related to clubfoot braces before so we just had some early questions
like how does one build a clubfoot brace?
What are the minimum components necessary to do that?
And so –
Our first few prototypes were very simple, quick, easy to make versions of a clubfoot
brace, ideas that we had and then as we got further along down the prototyping process
road we started to come up with more intricate ideas and needed to answer more intricate
questions and so our prototypes got progressively more complex and we needed to kind of change
our materials, processes for those more complex prototypes.
What were some of the key criteria you developed to guide your design?
So we knew the solution needed to be very, very cheap.
We knew it needed to be durable, we didn’t want it breaking in the field, -
And we knew it needed to be very, very easy to use because the easier it is to use the
better compliance rates we’re hoping you’ll get, and lastly we knew it had to meet certain
medical specifications for a clubfoot brace so it needs to hold the feet in a very particular
angle and a very particular way.
Ian this seems like a long process.
How long did it take you from when you first saw this problem to when you thought you had
a viable solution?
So I’d actually say that it’s probably taken us the past 2 years to really get a
high quality, high res –
Product out there.
You talked about prototyping.
How many cycles did you go through?
Yeah, we probably went through 30 to 40 cycles of iterations of prototyping until we got
to where we are today.