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Hongik students win the James Dyson Award
The 2023 James Dyson Award has its first international winner from South Korea. They are Chae Yoojin, Shin Younghwan, Baek Won, and Kim Daeyeon, all proud students at Hongik University. Named after their winning entry, the team, "The Golden Capsule," said they wanted to "tell a deeper story about the award that hasn't been told before," so we caught up with the four students to find out more about their story.
The Golden Capsule team consists of two designers and two engineers, all of whom are double-majors in design engineering. The Golden Capsule was created as a graduation project for the design engineering majors. The team leader, Chae Yoojin (Sandi 19), was in charge of the project and was involved in the overall process of product design, and contributed to proposing solutions, conducting experiments, and calculating data. Younghwan Shin (GISD18) was mainly responsible for building the experimental model, conducting and recording the experiments, and Baekwon Baek (Shandi19) was involved in the design of the product's appearance and the experimental process. In particular, Baekwon, an international student from Sichuan, China, shared her experience of the Great Sichuan Earthquake in elementary school, which helped her in the product development process.
As an engineer, Kim Dae-yeon (GISD16) was responsible for identifying and defining the engineering principles of The Golden Capsule, planning experiments based on her engineering knowledge, communicating with designers in the team, and creating prototypes.
"The Golden Capsule" is a fusion of design and engineering. The winning team's designer classmates were involved in production, design, and experimentation, while the engineer classmates came up with the design ideas. Chae Yoojin shared a specific example of how designers and engineers collaborated: "The Golden Capsule" team used a scale to measure the amount of water released from the product's balloon, and the engineers developed a matrix code that automatically converts the scale numbers into Excel data with the help of Professor Kim Ji-ho of the Department of Mechanical Systems and Design Engineering. However, the input image to the matlab was not clean and the matlab could not recognize the numbers, so the design team used After Effects to perform image processing to refine the image for the matlab. The result was a fast and efficient process for refining thousands of images of numerical data, which was then used to plot accurate experimental graphs.
The Golden Capsule team also received a lot of help from their advisors, Prof. Dukshin Lim and Prof. Jeeho Kim of the Department of Mechanical Systems Design Engineering. According to Yoojin Chae, Professor Lim provided a high-quality design process course and held various in-class sessions to help the team arrive at the best ideas for their solution. His teaching style was also free and innovative rather than following a set pace. Professor Kim taught us how to present our experimental results in a credible way. If The Golden Capsule had only been a concept, no one would have believed it, but with his help, they were able to create a more credible product.
The team of The Golden Capsule has been sharing deeper stories about the product. The team is confident that they are ready to answer any questions about the product. When asked what ultimately differentiates The Golden Capsule from painless injections, where patients self-administer painkillers, Chae said that The Golden Capsule has an element of negative pressure, while painless injections do not. The medical staff also acknowledged that although The Golden Capsule may look similar to painless injections in terms of form, it is a different product from the basic principle. According to student Chae Yoo-jin, painless injections cannot be injected quickly because the speed cannot be adjusted, but The Golden Capsule can reach a speed of 1.5 times that of the existing ringer method without additional manpower or electricity. This appropriately reflects the characteristics of emergency situations, where minor and severe injuries coexist and the range of fluid speed settings is very wide.
The Golden Capsule team seemed to have given a lot of thought and consideration to the safety and practicality of their product. When asked if the balloon inside the product poses a chemical risk to the human body, the team said that the component is a medical elastic rather than a balloon as commonly thought, and that they are considering a material called LSR (Liquid Silicone Rubber), a material used in medical products and baby bottles. He also said that if there is a problem with the contact between the elastic and the medicine during subsequent tests, they are thinking of coating the inside of the elastic with a special material. When asked if it would be difficult to use The Golden Capsule, a product that uses barometric pressure differences, at very high altitudes, Chae Yoo-jin said that given that the product can already reach a speed 1.5 times faster than the existing ringer on the ground, it can be expected to perform similarly to the existing ringer only at high altitudes. Even if the speed difference is very large, he said that the new improved prototype of The Golden Capsule has a speed visualization device, so medical staff can intuitively understand what speed the fluid is actually entering. The Golden Capsule team was preparing to conduct more advanced experiments to understand the effects of altitude differences and other physical quantities such as temperature and humidity.
We couldn't help but ask about the differences between the old prototype, which was submitted to the Dyson competition, and the new prototype, which was improved after the Dyson competition, and what further improvements were made to the product after winning the award. The Golden Capsule team invited six experts in emergency medicine to show them the initial prototype and consult with them about its usability from a medical perspective. As a result, the team added a velocity visualization device to replace the drip tube of the existing fluid to make it easier to understand the current infusion status, and added an interactive scale graphic on the outside of the shell because the size of the existing balloon shrinks very slowly, making it difficult to see the amount of fluid being infused at a glance. In addition, the team at The Golden Capsule observed and studied the posture that healthcare workers take when actually administering fluids, and moved the roller on the product to a position that is easier for healthcare workers to handle. "Even with this much progress, the current prototype is only the second version," said Yoojin Chae. "Like Lord Dyson's work, which is not afraid of failure, our product is still waiting for hundreds or thousands more trials and errors. The Golden Capsule team's determination and determination to continue to grow through trial and error is evident.
At the end of the interview, when asked to give a few words of advice to Hongik University students who dream of following in the footsteps of The Golden Capsule team and winning a global competition, Chae Yoo-jin and Shin Young-hwan shared the following.
Chae Yoojin: First, develop a sense of inquiry and curiosity. I think it's a Pioneer quality to be curious about everything in the world and ask questions like 'why does that look like that' and 'why do we have to do this'. Second, don't be afraid to ask questions. If you have the courage to ask questions with courtesy and sincerity, you'll get warm, thoughtful responses from more people than you think. Third, develop a scale of thought. It seems to me that how much I accomplish depends less on my capabilities and more on the scale I'm aiming for. I encourage you to aim for something bigger than you are now, even if it's a pipe dream!
Younghwan Shin: Always think about the why. There are no coincidences in the world, there are reasons. When you're creating something new, it's important to always think about the why, and always stay grounded. When you're doing something like a project, you're going to have moments where you're going to feel discouraged about the things you set out to do in the beginning, but I hope you always remember your initial goals and resolutions until the end.
Online Communication, Gaeun Choi
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