Sophomore Design Project

Technical skills: CAD (Solidworks), Product Design, Market Research, Rapid Prototyping

As part of the design project in ME 263: Introduction To Mechanical Engineering Design, Innovation And Entrepreneurship, we innovated on a new crutch design to alleviate user discomfort and aid in the user’s movement. The product design was divided into three phases: Market Research, Concept Generation for Low-Fidelity Prototype, and Medium-Fidelity Prototype.

Market research was done by sending out online polls to our target market, and obtaining characteristics of an ideal crutch to find and evaluate existing competitor products. Then, a weighted matrix approach was used to evaluate the importance of the crutch’s attributes.

At the second phase, a functional decomposition chart was used to generate concepts. The better designs were filtered based on the attributes gathered from the first phase. Once the final design was confirmed, a bill of materials (BOM) was constructed for industrial manufacturing, and its profitability was evaluated. A low fidelity prototype was made to demonstrate our improvements and features.

At the final phase, 3D models were constructed on CAD and a medium fidelity prototype was 3D printed. Each team member evaluated the parts using various engineering analysis methods. Our innovations in our final design were the forearm cushion grip and the hand grip to increase the surface area between the crutch and the user’s arms, reducing pressure and increasing comfort.

In the end, we were able to present our design and prototype to industry experts and get feedback on how to improve our prototype functionally and for industrial manufacturing. Our final report can be found below: