Team:Purdue/Human Practices

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Human Practices

Overview

Our work in human practices focused on answering two questions: will our diagnostic test responsibly impact the world in a positive way, and if so how can we best tailor our design to the needs of those seeking to use it. To answer these questions, we sought the advice of professionals specializing in paper-based assays and the opinions of those who would feasibly come into contact with the test at each step of the diagnostic process. The insight we gained from these interactions demonstrated that Yeast ID has a high potential to responsibly improve the lives of those suffering from yeast infections. By listening to feedback from these key stakeholders we were also able to identify and correct previously unforeseen problems in assay design, propelling us closer to our goal of making as large and positive as possible. Our human practices process consists of six basic steps.

Step 1

Doing research on the problem and learning diagnosis and treatment processes

Follow up on findings from literature review by investigating diagnosis and treatment processes first hand.

Who we talked to:

Step 2

Developing our Paper-Based Assay

Throughout the process of building our paper-based assay, we consulted professionals who helped us change our assay to better fit the needs of healthcare professionals and patients everywhere.

Who we talked to:

Step 3

Learn how to Relay our research to the public

Communicating our research and transporting or assay to the public is important when making our assay more globally accessible.

Who we talked to:

Integrated HP:

Step 4

IRB-approved survey

The most important stakeholder for any diagnostic test is the user, the person tasked with completing the necessary steps and analyzing the results. Unfortunately, the stigma associated with yeast infections and the difficulty of finding a large diverse population of potential users make collecting data from this key demographic challenging. Thankfully Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online survey distribution platform, was able to help us circumvent these problems. After working with the Purdue Statistics Department to eliminate biases from our survey questions and receiving IRB approval, the survey was distributed and completed by 239 potential users. The survey allowed us to collect data on the habits of those with potential yeast infections and determine minimums for assay cost and speed among other metrics. Because users preferred the test have two sample channels instead of the one channel offered by our paper-based assay at the time, we updated our test design. To view our survey questions and full findings, click the link below,

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Step 5

Collaboration

A truly accessible assay can be shipped anywhere with minimal shipping accommodations. To test how shipping and dormancy would affect the functionality of our assay we shipped prototypes to the Northwestern iGEM Team for experimentation. Although we were unable to characterize the impact of shipping on test effectiveness, the interaction demonstrated that our assay instructions needed to be more specific and that sample loading areas should be labelled. The updated design can be found on our hardware page. To view more details of our collaboration, click the link below.

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