Doctoscope

The Doctoscope is a children’s doctor toy that, using the same technology as a Magic 8 Ball, comes up with diagnoses for a child’s pretend patients. This toy is intended for children 6 years and older.

A child interested in medicine can use this toy to pretend to be a doctor giving diagnoses for their friends’ or family’s made-up ailments. When a child has a patient in need of a diagnosis, they simply hold a Doctoscope to the area of illness, gently shake the Doctoscope, and then read out what the Doctoscope says to their patient.

    

Currently, the Doctoscope supports 6 generalized diagnoses. We hope that the final version of this toy is a set of Doctoscopes, where each one is designed for a different major area of the body. Therefore, each tool will look like a tool used by professional doctors for that area of the body (i.e. a stethoscope-shaped toy for the heart) and have diagnoses corresponding to that area.

 

Parts

Die

A normal Magic 8 Ball die has 20 sides that say: “It is certain,” “It is decidedly so,” “Without a doubt,” “Yes – definitely,” “You may rely on it,” “As I see it, yes,” “Most likely,” “Yes,” “My sources say no,” etc.

Because our toy should give diagnoses, we decided that we should have a 6-sided die inside our toy that says:

• Flu
• Anxiety
• Asthma
• Shin Splints
• Nail Fungus
• Stress Fracture

The above diagnoses were the result of testing, and were changed from our original list to the current list so that the words would fit on the printed die. We decided the prototype should have diagnoses from all over the body.

The die is a cube of dimensions 0.75 in x 0.75 in x 0.75 in.

Below is a screenshot of our CAD design.

The cube was printed on a Stratasys 3D printer.

Top

Below is the CAD drawing of the top half of the Doctoscope. All measurements are in inches. The top half features an opening to allow users to see the messages on the die within the Doctoscope. A 1″ x 0.75″ rectangle of 1/8″ clear acrylic was laser cut to fit over the opening, then super glued on to act as a window.

This part was printed on an NVBOT 3D printer.

Bottom

Below is the CAD drawing of the bottom half of the Doctoscope. All measurements are in inches. The bottom mirrors the top half, except without an opening.

This part was also printed on an NVBOT 3D printer.

Assembly

Below is the CAD drawing of the assembly of the top and bottom

 

Manufacturing

The cube was printed on a Stratasys, and the top and bottom portions of the handle were each printed on the NVBots. The window was laser cut out of 1/8″ acrylic.

              

The pictured prototype was made by first putting the cube into a clear balloon, and filling the balloon with water by attaching it to the end of a faucet. The balloon was filled with about 1/4 cup of water. The balloon was then held and removed from the faucet, and blue food coloring was dropped into the balloon. It was then tied at the end and set aside.

The window was then glued to the top portion of the handle (fitting into its slot), and the balloon was placed in the spherical cavity at the top, and with careful precision super glue was applied to the edges of the handle and pressure applied. It was clamped and left to set overnight.