1st Iteration of Prototype

4 February 2025

First CAD Design iteration of the EyeDropper Device

These images represent the first-ever CAD sketches made in the prototype development process.

Since the beginning, our product’s concept was to have two separate components — the positioning and the squeezing — that would work together as part of one cohesive device. The first design of our device had the positioning component take on an entirely circular design, with a hole in the middle within which the eyedrop bottle could be slotted in. The edges of the positioning component that would interface with the face were filleted to give it a smooth, ergonomic feel on the user’s face that would prevent feelings of discomfort during usage of the device. Generally, the walls of the positioning component, as seen in the prototypes above, were made relatively thick.

The squeezing component was designed to have a round shape with a pointed bottom to make the feel of the device in the palm ergonomic. The shape of the squeezing component was also designed in a way that would guide the user towards holding the device in a specific way, namely, that the user’s palm would fall parallel with the part of the component with a larger and flatter surface area.

Finally, a latch design was meant to hold the squeezing and the positioning components together so that none of the components end up falling out of the user’s hand and falling onto the user’s face to cause injury.

After these designs were created in SolidWorks, 3D prints of the design were produced. This was when we realized that the components came out too big for our purposes. The positioning component was the size of half an average user’s face, and the squeezing component was larger than the palm sizes of all of our team members. As can be seen from the prints above, the squeezing component also did not finish printing — hence, the lack of a pointed bottom in the printed design.

The 3D print was generally unsuccessful, but it enabled us to visualize the various shortcomings of the first iteration of our prototype. Essentially, we really needed to scale the design down — one of the ways we planned to do this was to reduce the wall thickness of the squeezing component, and also, make the positioning component more ovular with a smaller radius.

We also realized that designing a device for a large variety of bottle sizes, as we originally intended, was a little bit of a reach. Namely, it was hard to design a general-sized slot in the positioning component for the neck of the bottle to fit into, and so was designing the cavity into which the bottom of the bottle would slot into for the squeezing component. Hence, we decided that our primary focus would be on creating a device that can hold the average eyedrop bottle. The average bottle was designed to be a 15 mL one with a height of 68 mm (6.8 cm) and a width of 22 mm (2.2 cm). Only after successfully coming up with a prototype of an eyedrop helper for a 15 mL bottle would we then expand our reach to a range of smaller and larger bottles.