Intervention I
Last updated
Last updated
As a mix of Living With Your Own Ideas with the Living Materials class, the first intervention of this term gives continuity to use the biodesign framework developed as my Design Space to create a "living" prosthesis, an artifact to can help and guide me through the specific niche of healthcare, considering my deep interest in researching Bio-Hybrid Robots methods of development and fabrication. Something that mimics and uses biology to develop new kinds of artifacts that act as living beings and have to care as one.
In the initial idea of the project, the development of Mohit's feet prosthesis seemed a good way to start implementing and creating a kind of device to heal his body parts considering the severe damage caused by a soccer gamer, however, the inaccessibility to analyze frequently and understand the evolutionary process of changes from his feet or even the prosthesis made me reframe my focus to a first-person perspective problem I've been passing through the last few years, by bruxism. This condition located in the upper side of the jaw, more specifically TMJ, represents a continuous response to anxious/nervous mental conditions that physically traps a disc between the cranium and the jaw pressuring a nerve to react in painful ways.
One of the possible ways to alleviate muscle pain over the centuries has been the technique to massage specific locations to relieve the inflamed pain stress, something that could potentially help me to be more aware of my body conditions, a functionality that could be implemented in my "living prosthesis" to understand the relation between the care of the patient by taking care of the object. In addition, considering my experience over the years with my condition I know how to map which specific points would be more important for me to increase the efficiency of my prosthesis, which obviously would be located next to my TMJ, and so the subsequent muscles below the face structure that surround line the cheeks.
The pattern was idealized and inspired by the movement of chromatophores, a specific muscle located on squids that creates the reactions in the skin to change color physically, the idea which surrounds those tiny actuators in the body relates to the physical pressure obtained by the radial muscle fibers which compress and expand the color inside the muscle to create an illusion that the animal is changing color. As a sequence, an old pattern developed by myself in another project that mimics this functionality was used in this intervention considering the time to accomplish the aims and ask the right questions about using something I diagnosed.
The pattern developed mimics the structure by creating distributed channels. The liquid or air passes through a distributed network until it arrives at certain specific points to inflate and create pressure against the region where most of the pain is localized. In the architecture of the shape, the stars are considered distribution channels, and the triangular ones, with more elasticity due to their geometry, have a dor at their center to inflate and create a ball of air or water to create pressure.
To materialize the pattern it was used alginate with calcium chloride, a crafted biomaterial that is formed by the contact of two mixed liquids to create a texture that relates to certain kinds of organs and tissues inside the human body considering its viscosity and necessity to get entirely hydrated all the time to maintain its original shapes, as veins in the human body, that when run out of circulation get dried and "die". In addition, to test the pattern, the jaw clay simulation developed in the beginning was used to understand the shape reaction to the jaw and understand what could be improved, something that made me ask if I could draw the shape, or even create a mold that could be already adapted to that specific shape.
However, even with those possibilities for improvement, the shape presented an adaptable property to its architecture that, when cutted in specific locations can be adapted to obtain a better size and dimension to the jaw structure in question. This possibility made me reflect on how much things could be better organized and implemented from the diagnoses and the possibility of having a parametric or generative code that already would understand the modules of the structure and how it could be adapted to each patient's body specificity in an easier way to produce the devices with a more personalized artifact with fewer errors to the patient's body.
Differently from our medical devices and gadgets most of the time are developed to be indestructible and last as long as possible considering the patient's health, this biocrafted tissue needs water to stay hydrated to stay in its original form, something that could be observed when observing it in the last three weeks, where in almost five hours that tissue started to get dried while reducing its size. This gave me the insight to use silicone to test once again the pattern, however considering the toxicity of the material, my next steps are based on making the walls and connections between the tissue thicker, which can retain more water and give more stability to the prosthesis along the day, something that was tested with a simple alginate that looked like an organ with thick barriers.
Create an exoskeleton that could make the pressure dots bend only where it's needed;
Create a case for the prosthesis where the were need to be changed from time to time;
Create a pumping system that hydrates the prosthesis and makes the pressuring dots work;
During the weeks when I needed something to relieve my pain, my brain thought and connected some processes and complications with patients during waiting times to solve their problems depending on which kind of emergency they found themselves in. My bruxism and TMJ disorder aren't an extreme emergency, but maybe in other extreme cases, the wait to produce the device could complicate even more someone's situation during their daily lives. From a first-person perspective, this project made me test new materials in different ways and understand how much I would care about something else if I were my only priority when I feel pain from my body conditions.
As a consequence this made me reflect on the possibility of not only creating a device but also a module that could serve the patient's needs in real-time to improve the efficiency of the artifact by developing a kind of software that understands the context in which the device would be implemented considering even different aspects of the patient's skin that could affect the prosthesis health as well. At least, I still would like to understand and feel this device through different spaces and contexts that could change the relation between the human and the device, considering temperature, humidity, sunlight and so other possible variables in the context.
