I worked in a rehabilitation lab at UT Austin, Rewire Labs. I was tasked with fixing and improving upon an existing 3D printed interface to hold electrodes against the scalp. I learned about different 3D printing processes and how to work around problems that arise, along with the everpresent SOLIDWORKS experience.
When I was brought on, I was presented with a white paper and a half-finished prototype. I used SOLIDWORKS and prototyping to build ridges for the electrodes to click into, and other structure changes to the montage for stability. I also built a framework in SOLIDWORKS to generate other configurations to probe different areas of the brain. One of the main issues of the old prototype was that a 3D printed surface will be printed flat, and can't fit the positive curvature of the head. To solve this, we started experimented with many forms of flexible 3D printing. Eventually, we found that wrapping the montage around a plaster head and heating the supporting struts to conform to the head worked the best. At the end of the summer, we tested our cap and found that it works just as well as the expensive interface from the company who provided the brain imaging machine.