Sisters and Friends
Chapter 26
Learning Curve
"How are you doing?"
Quinn heard the concern in Haroun's voice. Another all-nighter in the Design School shop, the final push before the critique and undergraduate gallery opening for those that passed muster. "I just shot the last coat of tinted clear surfacer on my biggest parts, and I'm putting it in the ultraviolet curing oven. Should be able to wet sand it, force dry it and shoot the first deep color coats in an hour."
"It's one in the morning, hon."
"Huh?" Quinn looked at the clock. "Oh, crap. Lost track of the time. Listen, I'll call campus security and get an escort to my car. You don't have to come and get me, ok?"
"Don't worry about it, Quinn. I'm standing outside the front door. Figured you'd need some coffee."
The young man smiled as he watched the woman jogging to the door to let him in. Even in paint-spattered coveralls and a scarf over her bright red hair, she was beautiful.
"Haroun, you're a lifesaver." She stood on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. "You should be sleeping, not running around in the middle of the night."
"I took a nap. I knew you'd be here late, since the lab's open around the clock now." He offered the cardboard tray of drinks. "Caffeinated, and decaf," he smiled. "Just in case you want to stay till you finish. I can come back and drive you home. That way you can sleep in if you get it done." They made their way to the break area in the lab, and settled at one of the tables. "How's your project coming along?"
"Not too bad, although I guess I should have spent the money and had the parts made with a laser sintering process instead of the school's 3D printers. I'm spending a huge amount of time filling in the surface flaws to get a decent finish."
"They are pretty small parts, so the rough surfaces are probably more noticeable."
"Five coats of surfacer, and it's a bitch to sand out the coats without losing the edge contours. Wanna see?"
They stepped over to the paint area, and Quinn turned the curing lamps off. Reaching in, she pulled out a wire frame on which tiny parts were suspended. It was part of a spidery mesh of sensors that were to be imbedded into a soft silicone shoe insert, which linked to a larger translucent tactile anklet.
"The trick was to integrate the force sensing resistors without damaging them. Walt was able to bond them to a polyester fabric mesh so I could control the shape."
He smiled, marveling at the way Quinn had focused on the aging person who might benefit from her project. She had concentrated hard on making the prosthesis- really, that's what it was- more like an adornment rather than a grim reminder of a deteriorating nervous system. Peripheral Neuropathy was a slowly progressing loss of sensation on the sole of a person's foot, making it difficult to walk with a natural gait.
She had learned about it when she noticed the odd, shuffling walk of some of the older people that lived in their neighborhood. Curious, she had spoken to a few of them, who were more than willing to talk to the friendly, outgoing young woman about their collection of aches and pains.
One thing led to another, and soon she was determined to help solve this problem. She would return to the subject often in conversation over their weekly group dinners together, quickly getting her sister interested in the problem.
"Peripheral Neuropathy sucks," she had sighed. "It really screws up the way you walk."
"It's a defensive gait, isn't it?" He had said to her. "Since the sole of the foot loses its ability to feel the ground, it would be easy to trip over your own feet."
"Yeah, the toe can catch the ground if you don't know where the bottom of your foot is in free space, so you tend to slide instead of lifting your foot when you take a step. The biomechanics of walking get really out of whack."
"That can't be good for your joints and tendons," Jane had mused. "It'll keep you from fully extending your knee, which would make it more stressed."
"Maybe you could move the sensation of pressure to another part of the skin, where the nerves are still functional," Daria had suggested. "The brain will adapt and create new neural pathways to interpret these new sensations."
"Walt could help you with the mechanics," Annie had smiled, poking her new boyfriend in the ribs.
Haroun studied the velvet smooth surfaces that most would see as near perfect. Not Quinn. She had a natural sense of what looked- or felt- right. In years past, it was focused on the superficial, but as she had matured she had developed a deeper understanding of humanity and a sensitivity to its needs.
He thought back to the way Daria had spoken of her with pride and growing respect as Quinn had fought first for her sister and then for her friend Annie. Sure, he was taken with her beauty when he first met her over a teleconference, but it was soon replaced by an appreciation of that same inner strength that she shared with her sister Daria.
Both of the Morgendorffer girls had a keenly developed sense of right and wrong that expressed in unique ways. Daria was more of a social crusader who suffered no fools; Quinn had a sensitivity to the things that made us human. But they also shared common traits. Despite their innate intelligence, each had insecurities rooted in their childhood rivalries. Both nurtured what they sensed were natural advantages over the other, and it was only in hindsight that they had begun to find common ground. In many ways, they found that they were more alike than different.
Quinn carefully touched a fingertip to the thinnest part of the sensor mesh. It had been sprayed with a translucent colored coating, applied with an airbrush in three shades of autumn colors. Like a leaf, she had told him over lunch a week ago. When I embed the sensors into the flexible urethane resin sole liner, it'll blur the colors a little and look a bit like a fallen leaf. It'll be like stepping on leaves as a little kid, but also a play on the individual recognizing the coming of the autumn of their lives.
"Still a little sticky," Quinn noted. "Another ten minutes or so and it'll be fully cured and ready to paint and bond to the sole liner."
Haroun noticed the tray nearby, on which sat tiny electronic modules linked by fine, hairlike wires. A larger, amber-colored rectangular strip of flexible circuit board was peppered with small components and haptic transducers. This was to be embedded into the anklet, which would translate the pressure of the foot into tactile pulses that would be felt by the still-sensitive skin of the ankle.
He looked around at the other students at work on their projects. Most were non-functional appearance models, based strictly on concepts and focusing on the product's aesthetics. Quinn, on the other hand, had assembled a team of people who could help her execute her concept and would be presenting a working device to her instructor.
Just like Mosaic, Haroun smiled. And like that project, she had made sure that the engineering and biomedical students that she had recruited would be able to showcase their contributions for academic credits, as well as be rewarded financially if the product or its derivatives became commercially valuable. He himself had written most of the software and firmware for the anklet's microcontrollers.
Daria had pointed out that the technology used to make the tactile actuators in the anklet work would have applications in other areas, and that provisional patents needed to be filed.
"Dad's talking to Stryker about this," she had said in passing, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a first-year design student and her team to be taken seriously by a major player in the medical products industry.
And yet, she hadn't noticed the envious glances that the other students cast her way. She wasn't satisfied. It was coming along nicely, but it could be better.
It won't be that long until Mom and Dad might need something like this. But then, they could afford it; what about all those other people that couldn't? How could I have made this more affordable and less complicated? There's gotta be a way to do this better and cheaper, so that anyone who needs it could have it…