Team:NCKU Tainan/Human Practices
Overview
Communicating science to the public isn’t an easy task; sometimes, we need to adjust how we deliver our research depending on the audience we face. Before the approach, we also need to understand what benefit the audience will receive from the systems and technology we bring. Therefore, Human practice became an indispensable part of our project, which acts as a bridge between researchers and general audience or even experts in different fields. We believe that only if we closely collaborate with professionals and deeply investigate the potential consumers demands can we ensure our product development is beneficial to our community. We explore and seek for innovated ideas though every interaction with different groups and optimize our product designs.We construct a framework of our human practice project that can be categorized as two main parts: business promotion and education. Throughout the business promotion part, we reached out to several experts for an optimization of functionalities of our product and constructed our business model with considerations regarding aspects of intellectual property, laws, and regulations. To mature our designs, we determine to turn to various respects of the community: doctors, researchers and experts involved in the business side of product development.
The educational section, on the other hand, was a collective set targeting at several audiences to transfer biosynthetic science. We attempted to discover multiple approaches and viable options to promote our products and collect feedbacks from our audiences
We realize that the deeper research we dive in, the more uncertainty and unknown emerge as accompany. However, the desire to develop mature product that meets the market demands urges us to keep investigating our core issue: what is the solution to depression? and we keep asking: how do we position ourselves and our research product? Our iGEM project is to intrigue more people’s interests and come together to solve this complicated and challenging issue.
Expert visits
Before we are able to get started on developing our idea into a product, we need to make sure that our idea is as close to perfect as possible, and that means tons of research and experiments. But, the real problem with many ideas, and perhaps the reason why many fail to become a success, is a lack of expertise. No matter how much time and effort we put into research, there will always be an expert who knows the topic or even industry much better than we do. So, to help further verify and improve our ideas, we visited several experts in different fields.
Dr. CHEN,BO-SI 5/28
Director, Division of General Psychiatry, National Cheng Kung University Hospital
Professor, Institute of Behavioral Medicine, National Cheng Kung University
We met with Dr. Po-See Chen online to obtain further knowledge about depression. He provided us with valuable insight and information regarding the characteristics of depression and the relation of depression with the gut. We met him during the early stages of our project, and he gave us a lot of valuable advice regarding the behavior of patients, such as self-diagnosis which is very dangerous among people who suffer from depression. By conducting this meeting, we can understand more regarding the nature of depression to continue with our project. He also gave advice regarding our education activities, encouraging us to better spread awareness regarding depression, which you can find in our education page.
Professor Yu-Cheng Lin
Professor, Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University
Our first hardware idea was to detect human stress levels through saliva, we planned to extract cortisol which is the biomarker of stress, by detecting cortisol levels throughout a couple of days, we will be able to determine someone’s depression level. We made several discussions with professor Yu-Cheng Lin due to the fact that he has the real experience of extracting the different substances from saliva and detect the concentration of several substances through the paper-based electrochemical device. We wanted to continue and make this concept a reality, but suddenly covid-19 strikes Taiwan, so we were not able to go into any lab and we finally suspend the idea then search for another alternative.
Professor Chung-Hsien Wu
Professor, Department of Computer Science, National Cheng Kung University
Due to the fact that covid-19 in Taiwan escalated very quickly, we were thinking to find another way to build something even that we are not present physically. Then, we had an idea to made an artificial intelligence that can automatically detect depression using sound, and because none of our team members is from the Department of computer science we asked for guidance from Prof. Chung-Hsien Wu in developing the artificial intelligence.
Professor Chien-Hsiang Chang
Professor, Department of chemical engineering, National Cheng Kung University
Before settling with our current procedure of manufacturing Menbels, we wanted to make sure that our procedure and knowledge are sufficient for us to meet the requirements and make our system feasible to work. And professor Chien-Hsiang Chang has experience in making alginate layers to wrap several substances, Prof. Chang also ensures us that our plan is feasible and isn’t very hard to perform.
Enterprise visit
Just because an idea is good does not always mean it will sell well in the market. Our product may be designed and modified in the laboratory and adjusted to maximize its performance. However, we needed advice from potential stakeholders to ensure our product will meet real-world demands. We need to interact with industries to understand more about the industrial environment and current market situation. So, in order to refine our idea into a product suitable for the market, we visited several enterprises.
Trade wind biotech
Trade Wind Biotech is the pioneer company based in Taiwan that implements synthetic biology as their core technique. We were given the opportunity to visit their factory and laboratory led by Dr.Lance, the CEO of TWBIO. This year, we invited team CCU_Taiwan to join us in this trip to further strengthen our partnership. Both of our teams presented to Dr.Lance and received many feedback with insightful comments regarding our projects, especially on entrepreneurship and presentation skills. We even tried their probiotics coffee which claimed to provide skinny benefits!
Chen En Food Product Enterprise Co., Ltd
Our team was honored to be able to interview the general manager of Chen En Food Product Enterprise, Mr.Vincent, as Chen En is one of the largest bubble suppliers in both local and global markets. Before the online interview session began, we signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with them. We firstly presented our project idea to them and held a Q&A session afterwards. As a giant bubble supplier, their comments were critical and on point which assisted us in realizing the blind spots of our project at the time, like can we cook our bubble with the engineered bacteria inside and regarding the flavours. In addition, they also gave us some valuable market datas for our references. Through this interview session, we gained many insights and inspiration to further improve our project as a whole.
8D Tea Fresh Kitchen
To deepen our understanding of how traditional bubble tea shops work, we visited a local handmade bubble tea shop in Nantou. During the visits, we interviewed them and asked some questions regarding their IoT live kitchen, which is quite unique and advanced. They also suggested we market our product as chilled ready-to-eat (RTE) food, this is a life-changing comment for us. Before the visit, we were troubled by the sterilization and bubble heating process. Thanks to their suggestion, we are now able to categorize and understand the placement of our product in the market. Apart from this, we also witnessed how they made bubbles from scratch. It was definitely a visit full of learning experiences. For more details, please click on the file below!
2021 NCKU iGEM Survey
Genetically Modified Organism (GMOs) are becoming more and more prevalent in our society due to its wide range of potential applications. Although GMOs have been shown to possess high efficacy, those still remain a controversial topic among society. Despite the efforts exerted by scientists and researchers on GMOs, many still believe that GMOs are not safe
To better understand how the public perceives GMOs and mental health issues, we conducted an online survey. Through the survey, we were able to collect hundreds of respondents’ opinions along with their feedback on our project.
Population Sample
Fortunately, 73.3% of our respondents were young adults aged between 18-29 years old, who are our main potential customer group. Most of them are still students, meaning they have received education levels higher than high school.
Fig. 1. Age distribution
Fig. 2. Highest education level
Understanding
As we mentioned above, we wanted to collect the public’s views on mental health issues. We divided the respondents into those who have suffered from depression and not. For those who have experienced depressive symptoms, we had some more specific questions for them. 54.5% answered the major cause of their episodes is stress, this proved that stress is indeed a crucial factor heavily affecting one’s mental state. Apart from this, we also asked about the current solution’s laidback. The answers were quite evenly distributed, with side effects, low effectiveness, and price came up respectively.
Fig. 4. Have you heard of CKD?
Fig. 5. What is your understanding of CKD? (5 being an expert on CKD)
Fig. 6. What are the current treatments for CKD?
GMOs Acceptance
Since our product is also categorized as GMOs, we asked the respondents how they perceive GMOs in the survey. Safety issues came up first with more than half of the respondents agreeing on them as the main worry in GMOs based products. Whatsmore, when we asked them to rate their understanding about synthetic biology from scale 1-10, the average outcome was only 3.8. Therefore, we could deduce that lack of understanding is a hindrance in executing our project because the public would still be wary of GMOs based products and conclude they are unsafe. Thus, our education mainly focused on promoting synthetic biology and its application.
Fig. 7. What is your level of support for ‘Genetic Engineering’ or ‘Genetic Modification’?
Menble Acceptance
We explained briefly in the survey about our project and asked their willingness to try out our product. Surprisingly, ⅔ of the respondents answered yes and considering, leaving ⅓ rejecting to try out our product. We are glad that people seem willing to give our product a chance. When being asked about the factors that matter most to them in a stress-resistance product, there are three major factors: Benefit, safety, and price. We are optimistic that our product will be a hit in the market as long as we handle these three factors well.
Fig. 4. Have you heard of CKD?
Fig. 5. What is your understanding of CKD? (5 being an expert on CKD)
Fig. 6. What are the current treatments for CKD?
Entrepreneurship
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Collaboration
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Communication
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