End of my 16 weeks internship. Surprisingly, it have been already about 4 months since i last joined CUTE Center as a poly student and in a blink of an eye, im done. I think i was really too busy doing that period to even notice the things i have done. While everyone is going off from the company, im going to carry on doing this inernship till April. Since i have the major healthcare project on my hands, i decided not to forgo this job yet. So that means i have a few more months to go before im officially done.
For the past weeks, i have been doing the same things, getting interviews from friends and lecturers. I have also been trying to link up with doctors such as chiropractor and hysiotherapists to see what their opinion and comments on these projects. I have also been constantly improving my prototype so that people can get an image of how the technology can actually help them improve their posture. From the interviews, we further validated our idea that posture tracking and back problems have a huge potential over the world. We found out that with an active lifestyle, your back actually wont hurt as much however with the busy schedule of everyones work, we tend to neglect health and go for money or work. DUe to the high stress and costs of living in Singapore, everyone is forced to work at their best or get eliminated over time. I tried to fine tune my Unity 3D image of the spine and attaching the script on to it so that it would move in real time to the motion sensor,
Over the last 16 weeks, looking back, i actually am pretty amazed at the stuff that i am actually doing at the research center. In a way that none of the people from my age are actually involved in the whole process of product development. From sourcing to materials, to the hardware and software, and even the applications. I also had to think of business models and how we were going to sell or commercialize our product. From that i also mixed myself with researchers and business men to adapt myself into their thinking and come out with my own unique set of skills and thinking of a business savy engineer.
The experience i have gained really upgrade and improve me as not only an engineer but also a entrepreneur. I also found out that actually the skills that the modules in poly equip you is sufficient for you to start on a project however what skills you are going to learn to improve your final product depends on yourself, the creator. I also learned that Google or the internet is really your best friend if you want t learn something new. Do not expect your supervisors to teach or spoon feed you everything. However i do not want to forget the guidance that my supervisor, Yuichiro and Daniel and my director of CUTE Center, Prof Do for guiding me along the way and also truely believing in me to come out with a new product. They also trust me to purchase products which i truly find that is useful.
I look forward to the second part of my internship and really hope at the end of the day, i could come out with a product that is truly needed in the market and can help solve a certain problem or need in the world currently. And not only improving my engineering skills, i also want to leverage on it to build a product based start up in the future.
Friday, 13 February 2015
Wednesday, 4 February 2015
Internship week 15
The fifteenth week of my internship at KEIO NUS CUTE Center. My internship is going to come to end soon but however i will be carrying on with CUTE Center till April under casual employment. Since i have this sub project under me, i felt that it is a waste that the project will be left hanging once i left on the 7th February. I also wanted to leave on a high note thus my supervisor and i came out with an agreement that i should work towards a finished prototype of the product and complete the Lean Launch Pad(LLP) program before i left for enlistment for army.
Talking about the LLP program, this marks the third week of the program and the progress of the product and interviews are increasing steadily. We presented the interview findings from the second week to the audience. We interviewed a few groups of people, the younger, older and sports professionals because this was our initial customer segments. The results that we got were even more interesting as we found out that this idea has a great potential in the market as most of our interviewees have recurring back problems. We also found out that most people were actually ignoring the initial pain and not seeking professional advice as the cost of seeking those treatment is too high.
Another interesting interview we had this week was actually with a contact from the LLP program. We linked up with a physiotherapist from SIT, Dr Benjamin Soon and we got quite a few interesting suggestions from him. He also encouraged us to go into this application as back problems are an increasing trend in Singapore. There are more and more Singaporeans who visit him for physiotherapy session over the years. Even more kids are getting the problem of scoliosis which is the curvature of the spine due to improper posture.
Regarding the design of the product, he advised us to think of ways of improving our design of the product to be able to cover more degrees of freedom as the spine was able to move in many directions and rotations. He also advised us to make the device smaller as it would be annoying to the user if the product was too bulky and nobody would bother to use it
Regarding the applications of our product. he suggested we split our product into two categories. One is a consumer product and the other is a medical diagnostics kind of equipment but told us to tread cautiously inot the second portion as it would be hard to get the authorities to allow this without proper testing and documentation. He also suggested another application of Tele-Rehab which is an up and coming technology used for rehabilitation of patients who are not that mobile such as diabetic patients.
We also got quite many ideas on hw to improve and who should really be our target market. Thus with all the interview results and findings, we edited our initial BMC and filled it up with the edited hypothesis, and invalidating some of the old ones as the interviews till now have shown a trend that the hypothesis is wrong.
Also i have not been slacking on the part of the prototype, we have thought of how to use the potentiometers to map the angles on each individual hinge design that we were initially thinking of. Also we had to think of another idea in which we would be able to get more degree of freedom as compared to the initial idea. My whole team then sat down to discuss how we could improve the product further and make it smaller.
That simply sums up the second last week of my official internship at CUTE Center as i have been going around Singapore to get interviews from potential customers and professionals. We were also beginning to target distributors of these kind of health products as we could see what is actually the real driving force for them to ush our products out to the market.
Talking about the LLP program, this marks the third week of the program and the progress of the product and interviews are increasing steadily. We presented the interview findings from the second week to the audience. We interviewed a few groups of people, the younger, older and sports professionals because this was our initial customer segments. The results that we got were even more interesting as we found out that this idea has a great potential in the market as most of our interviewees have recurring back problems. We also found out that most people were actually ignoring the initial pain and not seeking professional advice as the cost of seeking those treatment is too high.
Another interesting interview we had this week was actually with a contact from the LLP program. We linked up with a physiotherapist from SIT, Dr Benjamin Soon and we got quite a few interesting suggestions from him. He also encouraged us to go into this application as back problems are an increasing trend in Singapore. There are more and more Singaporeans who visit him for physiotherapy session over the years. Even more kids are getting the problem of scoliosis which is the curvature of the spine due to improper posture.
Regarding the design of the product, he advised us to think of ways of improving our design of the product to be able to cover more degrees of freedom as the spine was able to move in many directions and rotations. He also advised us to make the device smaller as it would be annoying to the user if the product was too bulky and nobody would bother to use it
Regarding the applications of our product. he suggested we split our product into two categories. One is a consumer product and the other is a medical diagnostics kind of equipment but told us to tread cautiously inot the second portion as it would be hard to get the authorities to allow this without proper testing and documentation. He also suggested another application of Tele-Rehab which is an up and coming technology used for rehabilitation of patients who are not that mobile such as diabetic patients.
We also got quite many ideas on hw to improve and who should really be our target market. Thus with all the interview results and findings, we edited our initial BMC and filled it up with the edited hypothesis, and invalidating some of the old ones as the interviews till now have shown a trend that the hypothesis is wrong.
Also i have not been slacking on the part of the prototype, we have thought of how to use the potentiometers to map the angles on each individual hinge design that we were initially thinking of. Also we had to think of another idea in which we would be able to get more degree of freedom as compared to the initial idea. My whole team then sat down to discuss how we could improve the product further and make it smaller.
That simply sums up the second last week of my official internship at CUTE Center as i have been going around Singapore to get interviews from potential customers and professionals. We were also beginning to target distributors of these kind of health products as we could see what is actually the real driving force for them to ush our products out to the market.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)