Our current product development projects are listed below. For senior design, graduate students at EWH at UCI mentor undergraduates for the biomedical engineering course BME 180.
Infant CPAP Machine (senior design)
Preterm infants are generally born with less surfactant in their lungs than full-term infants, resulting in more diculty in keeping their lungs expanded. As a result, the infants have strong breathing difficulties and, without the appropriate help, they can develop disorders due to the decrease in oxygen intake. In turn, this can lead to chronic lung diseases which are often fatal for the infants. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines are commonly used to assist preterm infants in breathing and give them a chance at a normal life.
Oxygen Analyzer (senior design)
Medical oxygen is used extensively in emergency and critical care situations. ICUs throughout Africa use O2 concentrators (as opposed to bottled gases in Central America and O2 micro production plants in the US). Seeing as O2 is an odorless, clear gas, the hospital staff cannot tell if the concentrator is putting out 22% O2 (room air) or 95% O2 (proper function) until a baby dies in the incubator or a patient turns very blue in the OR. Previously, EWH developed a system to test if concentrators were, in fact, putting out concentrated O2 using only locally available materials. It has been tried in several hospitals and the results are good. However, some users need the use of an open flame and concentrated O2 problematic. This is a challenging project as cheap and reliable O2 sensors which keep their calibration are hard to find.
Universal glucometer strips
Contact us for a leadership role: A diabetic patient trying to monitor his blood glucose level in Tanzania will have to obtain a glucometer and its corresponding disposable strips. However, it is relatively easy to get a donated glucometer so the cost to the patient for each test will be the price of a glucometer strip, about 2000 Tanzanian Shillings (or $1.32). With these prices, an overwhelming majority of diabetic Tanzanians can’t afford to monitor themselves even once a day and they end up needing hospital treatment that they could have otherwise avoided. To remedy this, we would like to develop affordable glucometer strips which could be locally manufactured, either on site or as part of a cottage industry. Moreover, each brand of glucometer requires specific disposable strips which are very difficult.
Incubator Temperature Control System
Contact us for a leadership role: Thermal stability in incubators is essential to improve the health of sick, very low birth weight infants. Moreover, this stability is most pressing when primitive incubators over-heat, killing their occupants, or when primitive baby warmers fail to provide enough heat (perhaps out of fear of overheating), also killing their occupants. We are looking for a team to design a temperature control system for incubators with a closed feedback loop that will shut the heater off when it gets too hot. Basically, this project involves the creation of a low-cost thermostat for an AC powered heating device, whether it’s a bulb or a space heater. This is potentially a very high impact project, as the low-cost but versatile sensor/processing/display platform can be used for a wide variety of designs for the developing world.
