In real life this project would have many more limitations, however in our assignment we had a bit more free reign when it came to wild ideas. The main thing I noticed, was that the numbing device or agent needed to be packaged with the syringe as a standardized practice. In brainstorming, some of the ideas I (and others in ENGI 201) came up with were:

• endothermic rxn
• patch
• Novocaine
• nuclear power source
• peltie plate
• squirt of compressed air
• liquid nitrogen (LN2)

I went on to sketch out some of these ideas, and some other ideas for ways to attach the devices to the syringe in a way that would be easy to pop on and off. I decided on a simple plastic piece that could be easily snapped on and off the syringe.

For the patch, I thought of two alternative ideas: mount the patch first to the syringe, so all the clinician has to do is peel it off, or in addition, have the patch be coated with a numbing gel, so you don’t pull of the patient’s hair.

I also thought of a different way to have the powder/water idea work, where the orientation of the seal is different and all you would have to do to break it is depress the plunger, so it would both mix and be expelled from the tube with the same action.

I constructed five of the ideas, including: the system to mix the powder and the water to make the numbing agent that could then be squeezed out of a tube attacked to the syringe onto the patient’s skin. Note: the mini flutes represent syringes. I also made a prototype of another method of applying a numbing agent with a Q-tip like applicator that would be sealed in a twist-off tube aside the syringe. Another idea was the cooling metal disk that would be attached to a power source to let it cool. I made this with the wires represented by green string and could be wrapped around the syringe for storage purposes. The downside to that though, would be that it could be hard to see the measurement marks on the syringe in this set up, so the wires may need to be bound another way. Another idea was to use LN2 in a controlled amount to cool the patient’s skin. So for the LN2 idea I attached a small canister with LN2 inside, which would be sprayed onto the patient’s skin by pressing the red pom pom button on the side of the canister(paper). Lastly, I made one with a patch directly attached to the syringe. The upside to this format is the small size it would take up.  It would be covered by protective plastic, the plastic could then be peeled up, exposing the patch. Then the patch would also be peeled of the syringe and placed on the patient to administer the numbing agent, followed by the shot.