Interview with the Customer

 

Engineering meets Nursing!

To test our design, we set up a meeting with some faculty on campus that work for the University of Maine School of Nursing.  We were lucky enough to meet with Nilda Cravens, Susan Wheaton, and Deborah Eremita, all nurses that have many years of experience and have used many different kinds of pill crushers in the field.  At first it seemed that the nurses were almost intimidated by the design, because it looks nothing like what they have seen with previous pill crushers; until they tried it!  The nurses were very impressed with how easy the crusher was to use.  In fact, one of the nurses that operated the crusher, Deborah Eremita, was recovering from a broken elbow and still found the crusher easy to use.  During the interview it wasn’t uncommon to hear things such as, “I really like the roller design and how it crushes the pill using a rolling action versus repetitive impact” and “It’s really quiet and doesn’t require much effort to operate.”

 

Crusher Optimization

The pill crusher that we brought to the interview is our prototype that we made to our best ability to test our design.  There are several different things that we would do to optimize our design and make it perform even better and make it more practical to be used in the work force.

Changes to Optimize design:

  1. Make pill crusher more compact, this would make the crusher easier to transport and take up less space on a medical cart.
  2. Shed some pounds! Making some parts that aren’t in a high stress area, out of plastic. Plastic parts would reduce the overall weight of the crusher, and maybe even reduce the cost.
  3. Design wall mounts.  Wall mounts would make the pill crusher a lot more stable when being used and allow hospitals and nursing homes to mount the pill crusher in one location for multiple nurses to use.

Thank you Nurses for your input!

Deborah Eremita, R.N., M.S.N.
Lecturer in Nursing
deborah.eremita@umit.maine.edu
(207) 581-2603

Nilda Cravens, R.N., M.S.N
Lecturer of Nursing
nilda.cravens@umit.maine.edu
(207)  581-2593

Susan Wheaton
Lecturer in Nursing
Learning Resource Director
Susan.a.wheaton@umit.maine.edu
(207) 581-2594