The Monarch 1st annual Build-A-Thon presented an opportunity for the research teams to suggest updates for J&J to incorporate in future products. In this two week period, Nicole contributed to multiple teams across Monarch and Shockwave.

Nicole worked on tool grooming for a working channel instruments in the Monarch device. Tool Grooming is the process of reverse engineering a set of part prototypes. The goal of this task is to validate that the anticipated assembly functionality from the part drawings is consistent with actual assembly performance.

There is no set method for Tool Grooming, making the task more difficult than others. It is an iterative process of building, analysis, manually altering, and testing until all desire changes have been identified and part drawings have been updated.

Nicole worked on a component design project, in which is aimed to created a experimental test set for other engineers to continue collecting data and solidify the design changes after the end of her tenure. The experiment test set included functional prototypes, a feedback form, and experiment procedure.

Nicole led a collaboration with the Human Factors department to design the prototypes. Engineers within Instruments and Accessories team tested the preliminary prototypes to ensure functionality. Then Nicole met with multiple clients of the Monarch device, specifically surgeons, to run the entire experiment, according the procedure, utilizing both the feedback form and procedure to ensure effective data collection.