Insights and Reflection

Catholic Junior College 2012 Ng Hao Yuan, 1T12 Insights & Reflections 2012 Task 1: Adaptation of the knee pad (498 words)

CJ052

Our project, Safer for me, focuses on reducing the number of injuries sustained by the elderly community from falls with the use of a knee pad. We have learnt the importance and the fragility of the knee in the human being. It has also enabled us to better understand the factors affecting the severity and prevalence of such falls. The strengths of our project includes the padded protection it offers to users and the amount of injuries it could reduce in the elderly community. The project would also raise awareness for the importance of taking care our fragile knees whilst promoting our product. However, we have failed to account that there would be limitations when trying to produce such a product. For example, there are difficulties in gathering the materials to produce a prototype. Furthermore, assembly is hard without the availability of professional machinery in our access. During the course of our project, some references were made to companies such as Assissted living. We could approach them to request for help and funding for the production of the prototype. This would help in long term funding for our project which could possibly maintain the long term success of such a product. Another alternative is to approach National Youth Council and apply for a Young ChangeMaker initiative, the Young ChangeMaker Grant of SGD$3000 to fund the project. This would help in producing the knee pad which would otherwise be unaffordable by our group. However, this would be a short term funding for our project and may limit the success in reaching the majority of the targeted elderly community. Presently, our group plans to publicise through social medias such as Facebook and Youtube. However, with the grant or the funding, we could also advertise our project with brochures, possibly placed around respective local clinical and pharmaceutical stores or nursing homes so that our targeted community, the elderly, could be better exposed to our product and on ways to prevent falls. Considering the fact that publicising of our product and awareness may not be able to reach the entire elderly community, our group could possibly donate or sell the knee pads to local physiotherapy centres or knee rehabilitation to help those who needs it more currently. This method could also possibly blossom awareness in the elderly community if introduced into such centres. Lastly, under the circumstance that a funding and grant is not achieved, we could also upload our invention online as a free open source for people to download the design of the knee pad and details pertaining to the knee pad so that they could manufacture the knee pad themselves. This would still be able to reach out to a small part of the elderly community if produced elsewhere as the design would be focused for the use by the elderly group. This method is adapted from Linus Torvarlds whom is famous for creating the free open source operating software for computers, Linux according to an online article (n.d).

Catholic Junior College 2012 Reference Torvalds, Linus - The Free Information Society. (n.d.). The Free Information Society Educating and Entertaining since 2003. Retrieved from http://www.freeinfosociety.com/article.php?id=99