“Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is the leading preventable cause of deaths in hospitals.”
Currently, hospitals here don’t use compression devices to prevent VTE. The ones back home can cost at a minimum of $4000. The device my team and I spent our spring semester working on should cost somewhere closer to $400.
The PneumaShoe is an intermittent pneumatic compression device that prevents VTE and the formation of blood clots within patients prone to them (post-operative patients and OB/GYN patients). Blood clots, if they break off, can travel to the lungs or brain, where they can block blood flow (as emboli). The blockage of blood flow can be fatal.
During the spring semester, we managed to build a medium-fidelity prototype, a proof concept model which had to be manually controlled during operation. Christine, one of my teammates who came to Malawi for the same internship, and I hoped to learn about automating this process. We wanted to use a microcontroller to run the device through its duty cycle and ideally be able to interact with patient input.
Our solution was the Arduino, a microcontroller capable of running basic programs. In theory, the program should’ve been simple enough to write. In practice, the amount of head-scratching and “Why isn’t this working?” conversations occurred pretty often. It was always the smallest bugs/errors that gave us the most trouble. Eventually, we had the program running an early version of our device’s duty cycle.
Figuring out the hardware wasn’t any simpler. Sifting through datasheets, searching for the right components all took time and patience. Each hiccup, each mistake was another chance for us to learn a little more about circuitry and its nuances. (We learned a lot.)
Finally, we had our device, all of its components connected by countless wires to one another. Of course, the first thing we did was hide the mess of wires and the Arduino inside of a box. If we were going to present this device, it’d have to look like any other medical device, complete with an on/off switch.