Engineering Medical Devices @ MIT 2.75 - Part II

Moderator: Alex Slocum, PhD, Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT, slocum@mit.edu

Design and Testing of a 3-axis Machine Used to Characterize the Performance of Running Shoes 
Clinician: Danny Abshire, Co-Founder, Vice President, Director of Global Marketing, Newton Running, danny@newtonrunning.com 
MIT Student Team: Aaron Gawlik, Mathew Gilbertson, Priam Pillai, Folkers Rojas, Adam Wahab

Current ASTM tests on running shoes are insufficient because they do not reliably capture the loads and displacements applied to shoes during running. This team will discuss a 3-axis machine that can be used to test running shoes that mimic's natural running more accurately than conventional tests. The design is comprised of a phantom foot that replicates the passive properties of a human foot and an actuated base that can impose the relevant kinematics to the running shoe. The shoe is mounted on motor to give a rotational degree of freedom. The shoe and the base are instrumented to measure force and displacement dynamically during the running cycle. The machine can be calibrated to emulate different types of runners by adjusting the trajectories of the base. As a proof of concept we have collected force, displacement and energy data from the machine.

Design and Testing of a Novel Device for Rapid Retrograde Intubation 
Clinician: Joan Spiegel, MD, Instructor in Anesthesia, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, jspiegel@bidmc.harvard.edu 
MIT Student Team: Charlie Ambler, Maria Luckyanova, William Palm 
 

This team will present a suite of novel device concepts that simplify and expedite retrograde intubation. Traditional methods of tracheal intubation employ a laryngoscope for placement of the endotracheal tube (ETT) via the oropharynx. For patients with an acquired or inherited abnormal airway (trauma, tumor, swelling, obesity, etc) these methods may be impractical or detrimental. In such cases, a retrograde approach via the cricothyroid region may be safer and more successful, but the method has not gained widespread acceptance due to the excessive time required and the difficulty in passing the ETT over a retrograde guidewire. The novel concepts presented herein overcome prior limitations by reducing the number of steps required and employing a stylet that guides anterograde placement of the endotracheal tube easily through the vocal cords. Initial testing using a mannequin simulator suggests that the new concepts may offer superior performance over current methods.

Design of a Low-Cost Pressure Monitoring Syringe 
Clinician: Joan Spiegel, MD, Instructor in Anesthesia, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, jspiegel@bidmc.harvard.edu 
MIT Student Team: Sarah Cooper-Davis, Sam Duffley, Ryan King, Adrienne Watral 
 

Endotracheal intubations are performed on thousands of patients every day, part of which is done by inflating a cuff on the distal tip of the tube to seal off the trachea. The air pressure inside the cuff must be sufficient to seal the trachea from unwanted flow of fluids, yet low enough to avoid cutting off capillary blood flow in the surrounding tissues. We evaluated several strategies and concepts to achieve correct cuff pressure and designed a syringe with an internal bellows pressure monitor. Many patents currently exist for pressure monitors external to the syringe; however, none of these devices are regularly used by doctors because they require too many changes to standard intubation techniques. This syringe uses a bellows inside the plunger to measure and display the internal cuff pressure. The bellows incorporates a spring and a seal into a single elastomechanical device, allowing for highly repeatable measurements. The design also maintains much of the traditional syringe design, in that only the plunger is modified. The device was calibrated to an external manometer and successfully tested by doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. This alpha prototype design successfully solves the problem of measuring air pressure in endotracheal tube cuffs and is a viable candidate for low cost mass-production.

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