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.