Stakeholder Feedback
Upon submitting our minimum viable product we re-evaluated our product using the stakeholder’s feedback and they advised us to stick to the initial requirements that we had established in preparation for the MVP. Although our design met the MVP requirement of being a crude pumping mechanism,we did not meet a bunch of requirements that were necessary to make our automated BVM design adaptive to an ambulance setup.
The qualitative requirements we set were that the design had to be:
- Non-intrusive size
- Portable
- Light-weight
- Durable
- Modifiable
- Constructed with repairable and readily sourced parts
- Includes easily replicable code
- Cheap
Although our design was functional in that it pumped the bag at the desired rate, it could be improved to be lightweight, portable and have enough torque to pump the bag. It was imperative that the device be simple and intuitive, such that a medical practitioner could seamlessly transition from manual use of the BVM to automatic use of the BVM. This was not possible in our MVP design which had the BVM embedded into the system making it fixed and impossible to place it in an ambulance environment. In the tense situations the automated BVM is being designed for, there is too much at stake, to rely on a potentially stressed user to follow detailed and possibly complicated instructions. We would like to make a design that has as few fail points as possible.
For these reasons we soon realized we had to fundamentally alter our design. For our alpha release, we decided to improve our design based on the all the above mentioned flaws by making the design more smooth, light-weighted, portable such that it fits seamlessly in the environment of the ambulance as well as provides enough torque to pump the bag.