BME Students Win Award for Innovation

June 24, 2008

A team of undergraduate students from Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering recently won an award for creating a device charged with no small task — keeping more premature babies alive in the developing world.

In the United States, premature babies are given the utmost care. They are placed in warm incubators and are attached to devices that monitor their heart rate and breathing. Such devices can easily spot apnea, a disorder common among premature babies, in which babies stop breathing for 20 seconds or more.

But in the developing world, where incubators are few, premature babies and their mothers are often left without the care and monitoring they need.

So as part of their capstone design project, four McCormick biomedical engineering undergraduate students created the KMC ApneAlert, a device that can alert a mother if her baby has stopped breathing.

The device recently won the Biomedical Engineering Innovation, Design, and Entrepreneurship Award from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.
The McCormick team, consisting of students Lauren Hart Smith, Kurt Qing, Alec Zopf, James Yang, and Shonali Midha, placed second in the competition and have the honor of being the first Northwestern University team to place. Team members recently traveled to New York City to receive their $2,500 prize.

“Our team was the only finalist team with all undergraduate students, and a lot of teams had worked on their projects for a year,” Smith says. “We pulled it together in a short amount of time, so it was great to win second.”

The project has roots in the global health technologies program in Cape Town, South Africa, where McCormick professors and students spend time creating devices for the unique medical needs of the developing world.

Since incubators are not readily available in many South African towns, the school and health professionals there have been encouraging mothers with premature babies to use a technique called Kangaroo Mother Care, where mothers keep their babies in skin-to-skin contact for hours and days at a time. This technique provides the baby with the warmth and thermoregulation it needs.

But such a technique doesn’t lend itself to the hulking monitors that normally keep track of a premature baby’s heart rate and breathing.

So last year, a team of students tried to come up with an apnea monitor that could travel with mother and baby. This past winter, this team took over the project and modified the concept.

“We feel our design is a significant improvement from before,” Smith says. “The new design makes it a truly unique device.”

The exact appearance and functionality of the monitor is currently under wraps, pending patent applications, but team members say the tiny monitor is attached to the baby’s stomach and measures breathing through abdominal movements. If those movements stop, the monitor sounds an alarm to alert the mother that the baby might have stopped breathing. The mother can then stimulate the baby to induce a normal breathing pattern.

“Other methods require a lot of electrical equipment and cost, but ours is low cost and low maintenance,” Zopf says. “It can stand alone while mothers do Kangaroo Mother Care, and as far as we know, there aren’t any other devices like this that can be used in that situation.”

Along the way, the team did market analysis to determine demand for such a device and learned that statistical research isn’t often readily available in the developing world.

“We asked how often apnea occurs, and the hospitals in South Africa said they don’t really keep any records, so they just had to guess,” Smith says. The team also had to learn about patents regulations in the developing world. “You don’t realize how different it is and you have to figure out how to approach things in a different way,” Smith says.

After the team created a prototype, they built breathing models to test the device and even recently sent it to South Africa to have study abroad students there test the monitors. Though they are still perfecting the prototype, the team hopes to have a final design ready for clinical testing here sometime next year.

Then, they hope to receive a grant so they can travel to South Africa and see the results themselves. The team says they made several contacts at the conference where they received their award that could help them make the device a reality.

“Hopefully they’ll help us take the next steps,” Zopf says.