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Student Projects

Throughout the CMI program, students are preparing for and developing their own medical products.  Some highlights from previous years are listed here: 

Team Tranquilift
Austin Minard, Cody Ruck, Thaarakh Suresh, Shreya Telang
 tranquilift

Medical Product Prototyping: Tranquilift

When the COVID-19 quarantines began, one luxury people grew to miss was being pampered in a salon or barbershop. For many wheelchair users, however, salon hair care is often a challenge. The process can require an individual to be lifted out of their wheelchair into a salon chair, but this transfer can easily result in injury.

A barber from Dubois, PA approached a team of engineers and rehabilitation experts from the University of Pittsburgh to develop a device that would help individuals with physical disabilities have a more tailored, comfortable, and safe experience at the salon.

“If you are a wheelchair user, there is currently no portable device to facilitate the elevation or tilting required to visit places like a barbershop or recreational facility,” said Anand Mhatre, assistant professor at Pitt’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. “We want to make these activities more accessible by creating a device that provides the functionality necessary to reduce and eliminate potential strain or injuries from a chair transfer.”

Accessibility is often an overlooked issue – from web design to building design, people with disabilities often experience a myriad of daily challenges that able-bodied individuals take for granted. This device, dubbed TranquiLift, wants to provide a portable solution for activities that require elevation, and Pitt faculty and students leveraged common tools to make it work.

“TranquiLift operates with a scissor lift and a secondary hydraulic platform to allow for a tilt. The user rolls onto a platform and is raised one or two feet using a manual hydraulic jack, much like what you would see in a car shop,” explained Cody Ruck, a bioengineering graduate student studying medical product engineering at Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering. “The tilt function allows hairdressers to wash and style from different angles. There are safety constraints that lock the chair into place, and there are wheels on the base for portability.”

The first Tranquilift prototype is in development with the hope of being deployed at Baka’s Barbershop in the summer. From there, the team will evaluate its performance and make the necessary design revisions. By the end of the year, they hope to have a fully deployed device that can potentially be commercialized.

The team includes bioengineering students Austin Minard, Cody Ruck, Thaarakh Suresh, and Shreya Telang under the guidance of Anand Mhatre and Kilichan Gurleyik, assistant professor of bioengineering at Pitt.

“TranquiLift is the first product of its kind that will give clients the kind of therapeutic, self-care experience that that we have all come to appreciate at a barbershop or salon,” said Mhatre. “We’re starting in the barbershop and hope to extend the device to other settings.”

Team Aquapore
Adam Czibur, Randy Lee, Doug Roberts, Tim Simon, Celia Sun
 Auquapore

Medical Product Development: Team Aquapore

“I couldn’t even begin to say how much I learned from this project, especially after seeing it through from the early stages all the way to a first prototype. Lecture was helpful and working with a real-life project in the early stages of development was extremely beneficial. The project and lecture series gave real insight into the process of getting a medical device from the lab into a commercial product.” -Doug Roberts, student team member

In Medical Product Development (BIOENG 2151), students learn about the important details that bring an innovation to the public: regulatory analysis, market analysis, and intellectual property analysis to name a few. To provide a hands-on learning experience, the professors match groups of students to a clinical mentor that has an early-stage medical device concept/ prototype. Aquapore was one of the teams in the Spring 2016 course and they had a very successful experience with their project and clinical mentor.

The students on the team were Adam Czibur (MPE-MS), Randy Lee (PhD), Doug Roberts (MPE-MS), Tim Simon (MBA-MS) and Celia Sun (MPE-MS).

Aquapore is a new prosthetic liner, developed by Esteban Ruiz, that aims to reduce chafing, rashes and pain. The five-person team would meet with Esteban Ruiz, a PhD student who works with Dr. Brienza, on a weekly basis to learn about the continued innovation of the liner prototype as well as update their mentors on their own progress with their development work on Aquapore. This close collaboration was key to the students’ immersive educational experience.  

Doug Roberts had previously worked with the Aquapore mentors in Fall 2015 through the Office of Enterprise Development with the Innovation Institute. This experience contributed to the team’s close working relationship with their mentors in the spring semester. Doug notes that his early connections and previous grasp on the technology helped his MPD team hit the ground running; their collaborative teamwork in MPD helped build on this earlier work that he had done for Aquapore.

The mentors had preliminary development work but the students were able to enter the project and delve deeper into the medical product development of Aquapore and particularly provide new insight for their mentors on the business plan and financial details. There was a symbiotic relationship between the technical development of the mentors, and the business development of the students.  

The student work in Medical Product Development is representative of the hands-on learning experiences that the Center for Medical Innovation provides in its graduate programs. For projects like Aquapore, it was both an educational exercise for the students, and a beneficial resource for the mentors.

Team Momma
Molly Finn, Randy Lee, Stephanie Quatchak, Josh Singer
 University of Pittsburgh students in a classroom

Medical Product Ideation: Team Momma

Medical Product Ideation (BIOENG 2150) is a foundational course in the Medical Product Engineering program within the University of Pittsburgh Department of Bioengineering. ‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.’ – Confucius. This ideal was kept in mind during the design of the course. To enforce the concept of ‘learning by doing’, while the various ideation tools are taught, students simultaneously get a chance to apply these learned tools to a project they are working on with a clinical mentor. A typical Medical Product Ideation classroom session consists of workshops, lectures by industry professionals, and hands-on team projects to help student teams master the skills learned in class.

Team Momma worked under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Bonidie and Dr. Pamela Moalli, from the Women’s Center for Bladder and Pelvic Health at Magee- Women’s Hospital of UPMC. A team of bright students working as a team to solve a clinical problem has been proven more effective than one individual working alone. Team Momma consisted of four students: Molly Finn, Randy Lee, Stephanie Quatchak and Josh Singer.

The first stage of the ideation process is “ethnography and needs finding”. The needs finding is done through a series of steps, starting with a process of structured observation called “ethnography”. In the case of Team Momma, the ethnography observations were done through (1) interviews with the clinical mentors, Dr. Michael Bonidie and Dr. Pamela Moalli, (2) observing procedures at the Women’s Center for Bladder and Pelvic Health and (3) observing procedures at Womancare Birth Center at Magee Women’s Hospital. Based on the ethnography observations, students used the process of “affinitization” to organize dozens to hundreds of observations into well-focused themes. These themes formed the basis of a “customer image diagram” which simplified the formulation of a clinical problem statement and a concise statement of an unmet clinical need. The problem statement described the drawbacks of how pelvic organ prolapse is currently treated. The need statement, as quoted by Team Momma, was: ‘A mechanism to improve patient acceptance of pessaries as a non-surgical treatment option for pelvic organ prolapse.’ The formulation of the needs statement was followed by a stakeholder analysis.

After weeks of brainstorming and other ideation methods, including “Design Thinking” techniques pioneered by IDEO, Inc, the Momma team mapped out a technical solution space using “morphological analysis”. Team Momma used these tools to narrow their search to two technical solutions which addressed the unmet clinical need. Before determining a preferred solution, Team Momma thoroughly studied the competitive environment and the patent landscape. This was done primarily to understand how pelvic organ prolapse is currently addressed in the medical device industry. Finally, to assess the commercial potential of their innovation, the team developed a hazard/risk analysis, regulatory strategy, reimbursement strategy, and a competitive market analysis. These processes are standard in the medical products industry today.

The engineering solution proposed by Team Momma was the “Absorbable Pessary Membrane”. The solution was explained through a presentation and a white paper submission at the end of the semester. As the team worked on their project throughout the semester, they frequently presented their work to peers, instructors, and clinical mentors. The peer and faculty evaluations gave them invaluable feedback on their work progress. Team Momma hopes to continue working on their early stage innovation to advance its clinical application in women’s health care.

Team GyrEx
Janele Archibald, Hana Casalnova, Brian Lupish, Scott Thompson
 Researcher working

Medical Product Prototyping: Team GyrEx

After performing several ethnographical studies at Pediatrics, Orthopedic surgery and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation clinics, Team GyrEx found an unmet need in the field of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. These studies were conducted under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Hannibal for Pediatrics, Dr. Volker Musahl for Orthopedic Surgery and Dr. Gwen Sowa for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, in the Clinical Bioengineering (BIOENG 2170) course. After spending time in Dr. Gwen Sowa’s Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation clinic and observing patient-meetings, Team GyrEx noticed that patients often struggled to comply with the doctor’s instructions on physical therapy and exercise. This motivated the students to design the GyrEx device. Finding the unmet clinical need was only the first step of the streamline process utilized by the students to develop their product. While constructing the prototype, the team got the opportunity to put to practical use the skills they honed during the first two semesters of the Medical Product Engineering program.

The GyrEx Team is composed of four students, Janele Archibald (MS-MPE), Hana Casalnova (MS-MPE), Brian Lupish (MS-MPE) and Scott Thompson (MS-MPE). The device developed by the team aims at increasing compliance with performing prescribed exercise outside the medical facility to prevent unnecessary costs of additional visits and to decrease the time of recovery.

The GyrEx device includes motion tracking sensors that are worn on the patient’s body. It provides feedback on the Physical Therapy exercises performed by the patient through a graphical display. The calendar and the MATLAB user interface monitor patient compliance with a prescribed routine. Bluetooth communication is used between the sensors and the computer.

Team GyrEx has prepared a detailed development plan for the device. Ultimately, the goal is for the patient to quickly and easily determine if their exercise repetitions are correct or incorrect and need to be modified to gain the most benefit. The GyrEx device will encourage greater patient compliance and therefore decrease overall physical medicine costs and complications.

Team SenTech
Nick Scangas, Mathew Niesslein, Margaret Evans
 Medical equipment

Medical Product Prototyping: Team SenTech

Medical Product Prototyping (BIOENG 2171) is a course in which students get the opportunity to put the tools they learn in Medical Product Ideation (BIOENG 2150), Medical Product Development (BIOENG 2151 ) and Clinical Bioengineering (BIOENG 2170) to use. This course is a perfect example of the learning-by-doing ideology followed by the Center for Medical Innovation in its graduate programs. The prototyping process not only helps the students put the skills they develop during the MPE program to practical use, making it an exceptional educational exercise, it also helps them contribute to “improving medicine, one life at a time”.

The SenTech team is made of three students, Nick Scangas (MS-MPE), Mathew Niesslein (MS-MPE) and Margaret Evans (MS-MPE). The EZ-Track Retractor Blade System was presented during the Design Expo of Fall 2014 and won the Best Overall Project award as well as Best Project award in its category.

Finding the unmet clinical need was the first step of the process. This was done in the Clinical Bioengineering course. Students performed ethnographic research in Cardiology, Neurology, Intervention/Investigatory and Orthopedics specialties by observing various clinical procedures. After observing an anterior cervical discectomy infusion, followed by extensive ideation, a clinical need for minimizing the time of placing and replacing retractor blades in the operating room setting was identified.

Currently, when a surgical incision is made, a retractor is used to hold the top layers of tissue back to gain access to the afflicted internal organ or tissue. The length of retractor blade changes throughout the surgery as the surgeon cuts into deeper tissue to be able to hold all the layers of tissue out of the way, this requires the surgeon to keep changing the blade depending on the required blade length.

The aim was to come up with a more efficient surgical retractor system that would minimize the time required to get the appropriate length retractor blade. After 3 months of brainstorming, self-reflection into the problem, ideation and several rounds of prototyping, Team SenTech proposed a user-friendly, easy to sterilize retractor system that allows the surgeon to adjust the length of the blade during the procedure without needing to remove and replace the blade during surgery. The prototype was produced in a stage-gate process, following a series of focused steps.

In the working prototype produced, one of the knobs on the top of the retractor extends the lower half of the retractor, increasing the length, through the use of a driving mechanism and a gear box. This allows the physician’s assistant or the resident to extend the retractors to hold back tissues as the surgeon stays focused and continues his work.

Apart from engineering the design of the prototype, the team also developed a business plan for their product, based on knowledge acquired in Medical Product Development course. With initial investment, Team SenTech hopes to bring the EZ- Tract Retractor Blade System to commercialization and improve the speed of surgery throughout the world.

Team Novus
Abby Badger, Samantha Sutherland, Doug Feck, Sushrut Bhalerao, Xiaolin Zhu
 Physicians in a hospital

Clinical Bioengineering: Team Novus

In Clinical Bioengineering (BIOENG 2170), students participate in intensive ideation work trying to identify problems and creating solutions. To have a hands-on learning experience, the students contact several mentors to observe clinical settings. Novus was one of the teams in the Spring 2016 course and their clinical observations and ideation led to a solution that they introduced at BioE Day, a BMES organized event showcasing the translational and traditional research being undertaken by students and faculty from the University of Pittsburgh in the form of panels, posters, and presentations.

Novus is made of five students: Abby Badger (MBA-MS), Samantha Sutherland (MPE-MS), Doug Feck (MPE-MS), Sushrut Bhalerao (MPE-MS), and Xiaolin Zhu (MPE-MS). They focused their observations in the specialties of cardiology, orthopedics, rehabilitation, and spinal surgery.

Samantha Sutherland notes that a meaningful component was learning how to communicate with busy physicians, and she recommends trying to call them or their assistants directly to schedule a meeting. Successfully scheduling these meetings allowed the team to observe clinical environments and become more aware of the real work environment for medical professionals.

Novus identified needs for these four clinics, and brainstormed ~70 solutions across these needs. They honed in on one solution that could help with anterior cervical retractions. This device idea was the one that they presented at BioE Day, which was optional for students in Clinical Bioengineering. Samantha suggests to future students that they should participate in BioE Day, whether or not their design is fully developed. For Novus, BioE Day provided substantial feedback and showed the team where they could improve their work. Participating in BioE Day was also another way to professionally develop skills like visually displaying work and verbally communicating a project to an audience.

These five students hope to carry on their idea in Medical Product Prototyping (BIOENG 2171) in the Fall. They already have a rough prototype, referred to as a “pretotype” in the ideation coursework. This early prototype is of a purely mechanical design, and Novus hopes to test an electromechanical design in the Fall and compare the two approaches functionally and physically.