Portable IV Stand

Portable IV Stand

 

Member profile details

Membership level
2018-2019 Team
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Team Name
Portable IV Stand
Project Title
Portable IV Stand
Design Challenge
Last summer (May-July 2017), I was one of the Rice 360 Institute for Global Health interns at the Hospital de Cancer de Barretos. During my stay at the palliative unit, I shadowed home visits by the hospital’s mobile unit and became aware of the need for a portable IV stand. Currently, nurses complete roughly 75 home visits per month and set up IVs for patients two or three times a week. The medical staff going on these home visits travels in small vans which cannot fit a conventional IV stand. As a result, the staff is forced to creatively improvise at the patient’s home. For example, they hook the IV bags on a wire clothes hanger and they then hang it from a window frame or a nail in the wall.
This summer, as an intern at TXRX Labs (a non-profit “makerspace” in Houston), I began working on this challenge on my own time and went through the initial steps of the design process. During that time I communicated regularly through video calls and Whatsapp with Dr. Luis Fernando, our point contact at the hospital in Barretos, Together, we have nailed down the design constraints and criteria, and have begun brainstorming solution ideas.
While the primary objective of the project is to develop a portable stand to meet the needs of the nurses at Barretos, as I improve my understanding of the home-based palliative-care environment my vision has evolved. I would like to transform the conventional IV stand from a “dumb” piece of metal into a modular system that could address other challenges that the nurses face. For example, Dr. Luis has requested multiple hanging hooks and we have discussed the possibility of accessories to provide alarms, a night light, or incorporating an inexpensive cell-phone with mobile apps or PalliAssist, to name a few.
In the Fall semester I would like to leverage the resources at the Institute for Global Health and the Engineering Design Kitchen to turn this vision into a prototype that we could put to a test in the field.
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Department(s)
  • Global Health Technologies
  • OTHER
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Faculty Advisor 1 - Name
Matthew Wettergreen
Faculty Advisor 1 - Department
  • OEDK
Faculty Advisor 2 - Name
Dr. Veronica Leautaud
Faculty Advisor 2 - Department
  • RICE 360

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Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen
Rice University

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