Spring Break
Four Hopkins BME students to enter finals in competition
| |
|
This week, four Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering students are headed to New York City for final judging of their entry in this year's Collegiate Inventor's Competition. Their invention, which measures electrical impulses in a person's arm muscles, is one of six projects to advance to this stage of judging.
Gillian Hoe, I-Jean Khoo, Stanley Huang and William Tam are the four students leading this project. Hoe is currently a senior and the other three students graduated in May. Their project originally began through an assignment from their design course professor, Robert Allen. Allen, who is a senior lecturer in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at JHU, assigned his students to come up with an unobtrusive way of measuring the force used by doctors while delivering babies.
The result of this assignment was a project that was worked on all semester long by Allen's class. Hoe, Khoo, Huang and Tam were chosen as the four students who contributed the most to the project, and so they are the ones presenting it in the competition.
According to Hoe, the whole experience has been quite invigorating.
"When I heard about this competition from my teammates, the first thing I thought of was 'No way!'. When we were still in the running after several eliminations, it just became one exhilarating experience after another. This whole situation still has a surreal feel to it."
How much force a doctor should apply during a birth is an especially important question during complicated births. A doctor or midwife wants the child to get out quickly enough so that they will not suffocate, but applying too much force could cause serious injuries to the child.
Previous techniques to measure this amount of force have included sensors attached to gloves or to doctor's hands. These methods are often inconvenient and get in the way of the doctor's performance. They are more of a hassle than an advantage. This new way of doing things may lead not only to a prize in a national competition, but a huge benefit for doctors and nurses.
Physicians believe that mechanical birth injuries are often the result of doctors applying excessive force during a complicated birth situation. One such example is shoulder dystocia, where the baby's shoulders become caught behind the mother's pubic bone. Essentially, the baby's head can be delivered but the remainder of the baby's body remains trapped inside the mother, and the physician must apply force, often to the fetal head or shoulder, to extract the child.
The potential uses of this apparatus also include training doctors as well as determining the best techniques to use during complicated deliveries. This new invention will be able to figure out which of these uses the least force, and would therefore be least likely to cause injury to the child.
The students' electromyographic invention involves attaching three sensors to the forearm of a doctor. These sensors are attached to a small metal box that can easily be kept in the doctor's pocket. This metal box collects information, and transmits it wirelessly to a laptop computer which can be up to 50 feet away. The computer can store and process the data it has received.
In order for this system to work, it must be calibrated for each specific user. This involves measuring impulses from the doctor's arm when they are at rest, then while pulling five pounds of force, followed by 10 pounds. These readings will set up the calibration that will allow future measurements to be accurate.
The students have not only created their invention, but have been actively involved in its testing and fine-tuning. Edith Gurewitsch, an assistant professor of gynecology and obstetrics at JHMI, has been the one in charge of this part of the project. She has already supervised 15 deliveries during which the device was used successfully. There have also been numerous tests involving mock deliveries performed using a doll.
When the device was completed, Dr. Edith Gurewitsch, assistant professor of gynecology and obstetrics in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, supervised an institutional review board approved pilot study, which tested the device during 15 deliveries. Dr. Gurewitsch says "the device seems to work well" after the clinical trials.
However, minor alterations to ensure the detection of nerve impulses regulating muscle movements is required, and this will be done by Dr. Gurewitsch and Dr. Allen along with the student inventors using a baby like doll to simulate deliveries.
The National Collegiate Inventor's Competition is a program of the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, located in Akron, Ohio. The competition originally began in 1990, and its other sponsors include Hewlett-Packard and the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
According to their Web site, the competition's objective is to encourage students to stimulate their problem solving skills. They also emphasize the importance of a working relationship between students and their advisors.
The competition is judged by a panel of experts including mathematicians, engineers, biologists, chemists, environmentalists, physicists and computer specialists. Entries are judged on originality, inventiveness and potential value to society.
The competition has two categories: one for undergraduates and one for graduate students. In the undergraduate category, there will be two winning teams. Each team of students will win $15,000 and their advisor will win $5,000. There is also a Grand Prize winner, selected from the pool of all undergraduates and graduate students. This winning team receives $50,000 and their advisor gets $10,000.
This is not the first time that Hopkins students have fared well in the National Collegiate Inventors Competition. Last year, Hopkins student Carlo Giovanni was a winner, with his invention for a non-invasive test for colorectal cancer. In 1997, Todd Waldman, also from Johns Hopkins, won with his project "Novel high-throughput screen for anticancer agents."
The team all seems to be in agreement about what a great experience this has been for all of them. Team member Stanley Huang was giggling as he spoke from New York this week. "I'm really happy to make it this far. I think that all the hard work from all of us finally paid off. I'm not really into the money; I'm just in it for the fun of it."
This week, our team from Hopkins is facing five other teams, comprised of students from Harvard, Duke, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, The College of New Jersey, and The Alberta College of Art and Design. Winners will be announced at the end of the week.
This is a good example of how student-designed technology can be an asset to the biomedical engineering industry. The Hopkins community looks forward to seeing how the students fare in this prestigious competition.