The EWH Design Competition seeks to reward the best teams of students who work on engineering projects directed at the needs of developing country health care. For the second year in a row, our judges picked the top three submissions based on their potential impact on global health as well as their feasibility, both technical and economic.

The winning team is the BP Team from the University of Oxford in the UK. Their submitted design is an automatic, non-invasive blood pressure monitoring system powered by a cell phone. This project has a very high potential in resource-poor settings where mobile phones are widely available whereas trained healthcare workers aren’t. The team will be using their $5,000 cash prize to continue work on their project.

In second place came a team of students from Purdue University. They designed a Low Cost HIV Disease Progression Monitoring Device. The third place went to the team from Johns Hopkins University which created a low-cost device to measure oxygen concentration output from oxygen concentrators in hospitals of resource-poor settings.

To find out more about the EWH Design Competition, please go here or e-mail jbenchetrit@ewh.org.

Northwestern University’s chapter of EWH provides its members with a vast number of opportunities to make a positive difference in the global biomedical community. From planning speaker events and discussion forums to establishing the Northwestern University 5K Run for Global Health, it seems as though this chapter is good at keeping itself busy. Here are just a few of the exciting things going on at the Northwestern chapter.

One of the more established opportunities is the repair session they hold on a weekly basis. These repair sessions are open to undergraduates of every skill level and major, and provide a means to work with graduate students and professors, applying their technical skills to repair actual biomedical equipment. Northwestern also holds annual alumni repair sessions, inviting university alumni back to share the knowledge they have attained in the professional field to help undergraduates repair equipment.

The high school outreach program is a great way for undergraduates to help get local high school students excited about engineering and the global health movement. This outreach program has monthly sessions at different high schools that include a presentation on global health followed by a build session- where students learn about basic circuitry and soldering techniques as they construct EWH ESU testers.

Northwestern’s EWH also holds monthly volunteer sessions with an organization called Mission Outreach. During these volunteer sessions undergraduates travel to the Mission Outreach warehouse in Chicago to help sort donated medical equipment into categories so the inventory can be uploaded to an online database for third world hospitals to use when requesting specific supplies. This enriching volunteer opportunity helps increase efficiency and reduces waste of biomed supplies.

To find out more about Northwestern's EWH please visit this page.
To find out more about Mission Outreach Chicago visit this page.

In collaboration with the University of Maryland Medical Center, the students of Johns Hopkins University's EWH Chapter are creating a clinical engineering internship.  The participating students shadow the hospital's 4 engineers and 20+ technicians in their daily work and learn about healthcare technology and its maintenance in the hospital setting. Occasionally, the hospital also has manufacturers of various equipment come to provide in-service, professionals with whom the students will also be able to interact.

In their first week, the students were introduced to all of the different departments within clinical engineering. On Monday, they worked in Equipment Distribution and helped with disinfecting used IV pumps and venodynes as well as distributing devices to different areas of the hospital. On Tuesday, they followed a tech around to the operating rooms and critical care units to learn about the patient monitoring devices and other equipment used in those rooms. On Wednesday, they went more in depth learning about the patient monitoring devices and how they are networked to the nurses' stations and hospital network. They also helped trouble shoot a tram module, the device that all the patient leads are connected to in order to read EKGs and heart rates. On Thursday, they meet the team of engineers who research and design vascular assistance devices. The engineers look for new devices that are smaller and more efficient, help doctors insert the devices in surgery, and check up on patients after surgery to make sure the heart rate is working well. They also saw the labs where they perform blood and tissue tests. On Friday, they learned more about the equipment used in the OR, especially the anesthesia machines. They helped fix the screen on an IV pump and helped perform preventative maintenance on a dialysis machine. Over the semester, they are planning to go more in depth into learning about different devices.

[Thanks to Sarah Brown, James Verdone and Danielle Dorfman for making this internship possible and for providing the material for this article.]