Meeting with Matron Kamera definitely helped us jump start our projects. Not only is she an administrative head of the hospital but she is a wonderful adviser for finding appropriate homes for our technologies.

Smartdrip: This is a device that I have been working on over the past school year. It monitors the drip rate and volume dispensed from an IV infusion for children. In many developing countries, IV bags for pediatric use are rare so hospitals have to use adult sized IV sets. However, because of the low nurse-to-patient ratio, lack of proper oversight causes unsafe administration of IV fluids, often over-infusion that can lead to death. Working in the pediatric ward last week, I have seen nurses use the adult-seized 5% dextrose, the most commonly administered IV fluid. To make sure kids receive within a safe range of volume, we helped squeezed the IV bags to the right volume, ejecting the extra fluids down the sink. I are excited to receive formal permission to demonstrate the device and possibly test it on a mock set-up in a real pediatric setting; however, the dextrose IV connection is actually different from a standard, so interfacing it with the Smartdrip design may pose a problem.

Dosing Syringe Kit: This kit consists of a 5c.c. and a 3 c.c. syringe with a set of clips for each that would be inserted in the syringe and thus, prevents more than a certain volume of fluid from being drawn. Nurses then can quickly, with accuracy and precision, draw the same volume of liquid—whether liquid medication or vaccine—each time. Matron Kamera advised us to demonstrate the kit in the pediatric ward as liquid medication is mainly administered there. Female and male wards use tablets while the ART clinic has decided to stop administering liquid HIV medication after conducting a pilot study with the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation. It was found that mothers are less cautious with liquid medication. Moreover, once the liquid is spilt, mothers are unwilling to admit to their mistake and thus skip the return appointment. In the pediatric ward, benzylpenicillin and quinine are the two most commonly given liquid medication that are administered according to body weight. Unfortunately, the standard c.c. for the two drugs are smaller than 1 c.c. ( in the tenths range) while the kit has mostly measurements larger than 1 c.c. Moreover, the needle part used in the ward is too small to fit onto the nose of the syringe, which made us impossible to demonstrate.

Veinlites Transilluminators: These devices were donated from a Sugar Land biotech company. They may prove extremely useful because veins are not only hard to seen for dark-skinned patients but kids have especially small, seemingly-invisible veins. It is a common site to see nurses, like an acupuncturist, poking a needle on both arms, wrists and jugular area of a baby to try to draw blood or start a cannula. It is painful to feel the nurse’s frustration and the constant wailing from the babies.

Deering Scale: This small portable scale, originally used for weighing diamonds, has been tested by a senior design team to be accurate for pill counting. However, the hospital has access to digital scales that not only are more accurate to a higher number of significant digits but also are less sensitive to weight differences amongst pills. One big problem that we found testing the device at the pharmacy is that the range of the scale from 1 to 10 g is not universally applicable for all types of pills that need to be dispensed. Many pills, like Erthomyothin or Brufen , are not only very big but also given in a packages of 40 or 40, which weigh around hundreds of grams. The scale works for very small pills such as Diclofenac but when we performed an accuracy test, the packages using the scale are usually +1 in count, which proves its preciseness not its accuracy.