The project I am most proud of is the Custom Prosthetic my team developed for a real patient who could not find a prosthetic option commercially. We developed a platform for prosthetics that work for Metacarpal-phalangeal joint amputation and also a system that used some of our patients residual bone to actuate a new thumb. I acted as the team's leader, designer, and prototyper. I also contributed to the electrical and sensing portions of the project. However, those aspects were mainly covered by my awesome teammates. We used liquid metal sensors inside the thumb cap to sense the movement of our patents residual bone, which made us realize that there was a huge opportunity for other prosthetics developers to communicate with surgeon's and strategically leave bits of rigid material inside an amputation, as it could potentially lead to more options for creating useful and accurate active prosthetics.

Throughout the course of this project we ran into many roadblocks. The most recursive one was figuring out how to rigidly fit our harness to our patient's hand, after all it will have to bear the load of anything they chose to pick up. We resolved this issue by increasing the surface area that the harness clamped to as well as adding more compliant straps. But this solution is still far from perfect.

This project is ongoing, but we reached our first check point, a working prototype, after about 1.5 years. Not all of this time was spent on the prosthetic as the team was all full time students , worked full time over the summer, and there was Covid. But, I would estimate this project really took our team about 5-6 months of full time effort. Throughout that time I learned how valuable it is to fail quickly. I went through four major design iterations from start to finish with each having its own myriad of problems and solutions, but I was able to iterate quickly and eventually come to a good solution that the team was able to successfully implement. But failing quickly and trying again is my biggest take away.