It’s a week before our team departs for Malawi and we are busily packing and preparing. Liz and Hannah have been hard at work assembling and packing numerous medical supplies and medications for the community health care worker backpacks, while I have been working with the Sphygmo senior design team to build the devices for hospitals in Ethiopia and Malawi.

The Sphygmo device is an affordable automatic ambulatory blood pressure (BP) monitoring device designed to detect irregularities in blood pressure and heart rate in patients. When irregularities are detected, the device notifies relevant health care workers through an LED alarm. In the near future, this device could potentially save many patient lives and prevent complications especially among pregnant women. Currently, many maternity wards in the developing world are bursting at the seams. The few available health workers are spread thin among the many patients they attend to. Sphygmo could hopefully address this strain and keep expectant mothers and their babies healthy.

Below is a picture of a Sphygmo device and its guts taken while I attempt to do some troubleshooting. Special thanks to Team Sphygmo!