Week 1, Part II
Assignments
Our tasks for this week are:
- Plan and sketch a potential final project
Final Project Idea
Since I’m being sponsored to take this course by my work, my final project will apply to my job. That is to say, hearts!
I had a few ideas but the idea I’ll outline below is for a physical model heart which can be used to educate patient-family members during conversations with their child’s cardiologist or cardiac surgeon. When a child is diagnosed with a congenital heart defect and potentially needs a surgical intervention to repair it, that’s of course incredibly stressful news for the parents. The cardiologist or cardiac surgeon who is following their child needs to communicate a few key things to the parents:
- the specific type or combination of congenital heart defects their child has and
- the recommended treatment or intervention for that congenital heart defect.
However, before the parents can wrap their heads around what their child’s anatomy is, they first need to understand:
- normal heart anatomy
Also, this conversation needs to be effective with overwhelmed parents of all backgrounds, regardless of educational level, country of origin, language spoken, etc.
Thus, enters my idea:
A light-enabled 3D heart teaching model which can provide overwhelmed parents of all backgrounds with a baseline understanding of normal heart anatomy.
There are already a number of plastic 3D heart models available on the market, available in a range of colors, materials, sizes, and prices. Some have removable sections which reveal the inner structures and connections of the heart.
Some clinicians already use static models such as these during consults with patient-families, but in general there isn’t a set “way” that all clinicians handle this conversation.
I would build upon the normal heart teaching models currently available by integrating light into the wall/inner surface of the cardiac chambers which could be programmed to illustrate the flow of blood in a physiologically normal heart. I’m envisioning a model fashioned out of a partially opaque material (3D printed? molded & casted?) to allow for a diffuse light scattering effect. A network or mesh of tiny lights embedded within the walls could be programmed to blink on and off in sync in a pulsing pattern, mimicking the beating of a heart. The lights could be red in the left side of the heart, representing oxygenated blood, and blue in the right side of the heart, representing deoxygenated blood.
I like the removeable sections of material that many plastic 3D heart models offer, allowing users to see “into” the heart. I would include windows like this, and/or maybe just have those sections of the heart wall be fully transparent rather than partially opaque, providing a clear view into the heart. I would also include removeable sections between the atria and between the ventricles, which combined with the use of color and light could be used specifically to illustrate the changes in blood flow that occur when a child is born with defects like that. In this way the model’s utility could be extended to include two defects: (1) an atrial communication, called an Atrial Septal Defect (ASD) and (2) a ventricular communication, called a Ventricular Septal Defect (VSD). Although there are a few different subtypes of each of these defects, the teaching model would provide a generic substrate to describe the issues with the defect in general: the mixing of deoxygenated and oxygenated blood that these holes allow. When the ASD and VSD patches were removed, the pulsating lights representing blood flow could become purple in the appropriate chamber(s) to illuminate the mixing of blue and red blood due to the hole.
I’m sure I’ll continue developing this project idea as the weeks progress!