Handy Project

“The Hand is a visible part of the brain.” –Immanuel Kant
Hands are the tools of the humans. It projects our ideas to reality—giving us inventions that takes us to another world, papers that define our freedom and master piece that make us dance.
Sadly, like many tools in our sheds, they can break down and required to be fixed. Fixing hands, however, is much harder than fixing a hammer.
Fine hand motor skills is common symptoms in stroke victim. Connection between their brain and muscle in their hands are disrupted. With 780,000 Americans suffer from stroke each year, there is a large market for technology that can improve the healing process for the victims.
Our team, BioNivia Tech, is set off to tackle this problem. In our team we have
Not knowing much about the marketing of our project.
We thought our target, the therapist, job is to help many patients practice different exercise with patients until the patients has recovered all they can.
We also thought that they struggle to do so because there are far too many tools/exercises to do which only gives pass or fail results and with no quantifiable way of tracking progress.
The Handyman can provide ways to track of the therapy progress and can be used instead of several therapeutic instruments. It will also provide more efficient way to track result by more than pass or fail.
During the I-Core program we are forced to get out the lab and do some interviews to check our assumption. We will soon discover how wrong we are.
“Most of the stuff engineer make us is garbage because they don’t have the correct information to build something useful for us”. Remy Chu-Clinical Manger of Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center.
After several interviews we learned several things. Quantitative result are not just for the therapist and patient but also for Insurance Companies. Our product can be used for other patient with fine motor skill problem not limited to stroke. Our product need to have the capability to spot fakers look to exploit the system. Finally it needs to be
At first we assumed our customer are Therapist with important relationship with Patients. In reality, our primary customer are clinical directors with relationship with patients and therapist. We also have to consider doctors and insurance company for they play a large role.
Now looking back to post I-core, our business model has greatly improve with a large pivot in our customer segment. As for the job of the therapist we added to assist in learning to live with a disability. We learn that the pains of the therapist is not so much the multiple exercise but not having a quantifiable way of finding fakers. Our new gains now is to give a more precise measurement that will help spot fakers and help with motivation with patient’s therapy.
We have learned a lot during this experience and wish to provide the best recovery experience to not only stroke victims and many others. However, the most important lesson that we have learned is that our team is much larger than we have