L-R: Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, Mike Shelden, PT, PhD, Keith Reilly, ’20, Raja Muthyam, ’21, and Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affiairs, Joshua Hamilton, PhD
UNE COM is not immune to the innovation bug. One notable distinction is, rather than centering on the wide lens of a healthier planet, COM students are focusing efforts on the health of patients within the natural landscape, especially as that landscape pertains to mobility. COM student, Shannon Donovan, COM ’22, first learned about the Makerspace at a Clubs & Orgs meeting where the director at the time, Anthony Santella, MA, BA, presented current innovations that UNE students were working on in the hopes of enticing COM to participate. “I was interested by one of the devices,” she recalls, “but wanted to pivot and take a left turn with it.” Before admittance into medical school, Student Doctor Donovan was a prosthetic orthotic clinician in Portland. “I'm an official patent author,” she says. “Prior to this, I helped design a post-operative amputee a post-operative device. So I've been interested in designing products that will help patients and further their rehabilitation for a long time.” It is only fitting that she would be drawn toward a project that pertained to physical medicine, rehabilitation medicine, and anatomy. “There was this shoe that they were initially using to track foot drop when someone walks, which is what I treated for the past few years,” she remembers. “I had a lot of practice and experience working with patients who have some sort of immobility or limb dysfunction. I spent so much time watching patients walk, videoing them, slowing it down, and figuring out their walking pattern.” From her own clinical experience, talking with patients, and understanding current technological limitations, she had a viable idea of how the project could improve. “What if we just put the shoe on them?” she says. “Have them walk… the [shoe] would spit out a bunch of data, and I could automatically figure out what device they needed. Rather than taking 20 minutes to watch them walk, I could have them do a short walk in the shoe and have a ton of data.”
Mike Esty, BS is the Makerspace Technical and Project Specialist with a background in computer science, applied science and biology. During his time in the Makerspace, he has helped support a number of student projects. “Innovation projects go through a design thinking process: the first part is how passionate are you about it?” he explains. "We try to develop a
Getting Off on the Right Foot
"Clinically, we have a great idea as to where we want this to go, and we just need a little help right now with the technology to get it where we want it.”
-Shannon Donovan, COM '22