Bioengineering student project heads to national contest

It was a challenging task from the start: devise a way for one-armed diabetic patients to draw blood, check their glucose level and inject the right amount of insulin.

A group of six bioengineering students took on the task as part of their senior capstone design project this past spring. Now the team’s project heads to Washington, D.C., on June 27 as one of only 10 finalists at a design competition during the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America's (RESNA) 2008 annual conference.

"Our project deals with a disability that a lot of diabetes patients get. They'll sometimes get amputated or they might have a stroke and lose function in one arm," explained Eileen Hayden, the project's leader. "So basically we had to come up with a way to help them withdraw their insulin, monitor their glucose testing and make the process easier for people with one hand."

After discussing and testing a few initial ideas, the team developed a prototype system that lets patients with one functioning arm easily remove lancet caps, position their fingers at a desired test area and withdraw accurate dosages of insulin with air bubbles.

"We ended up coming up with a very simple solution, something you can just put on a desk," Hayden said.

Fashioned out of Plexiglas, the students’ prototype stands a few inches high. Essentially a cylinder with a wide base, the prototype includes notches cut into the base to hold a lancet as the patient twists off the lancet cap and a hollow cylinder deep enough to embrace a fully extended syringe.

"You drop the syringe and the bottle through, you turn the syringe toward a little notch we have and it holds the syringe as you pull the plunger in and out to what you need," she said.

Portability also was a consideration as the students were developing their device. The group wanted to create something small and light that a patient could easily carry from place to place.

Hayden, now a bioengineering graduate student at the University, says the prototype's construction was a major challenge for the team.

"We never built anything before. A lot of the other teams used rapid prototyping, but we had to mill and lathe ours," she explained.

Finishing the design for their senior capstone project was only the first step, however. With encouragement from their adviser, Nadine Smith, associate professor of bioengineering, the students entered the contest and were selected to present their project at the RESNA conference.

In addition to Hayden, the team includes Ross Budacki, Kim Kontson, Melissa Ong, Andrew Richart and Amanda Scott. The team's project was sponsored by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Association and the Penn State Institute for Diabetes and Obesity.

The design competition is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.