Award will fund international rollout of student-created breathing technology

A low-cost device that Rice University bioengineering students invented to help premature babies breathe more easily will be rolled out to teaching hospitals in three African nations, thanks to a $400,000 award from pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and London-based charity Save the Children. The technology, which is known as “bubble CPAP,” earned the top prize in GSK and Save the Children’s inaugural Healthcare Innovation Award program.

The prize was won by Friends of Sick Children in Malawi, the charitable arm of the pediatric department of Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi. The hospital, the University of Malawi College of Medicine and Rice University’s Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies are already partnering to distribute bubble CPAPs to 27 hospitals throughout Malawi. The funding from the Healthcare Innovation Award, along with backing from the Ministry of Health in Malawi, will allow Friends of Sick Children in Malawi and its partners to share the life-saving technology with teaching hospitals in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa.

Neonatal nurse Florence Mwenifumbo monitors a newborn that is receiving bubble CPAP treatment at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.

“This remarkable project shows what can be achieved through grassroots innovation, and we are delighted to be able to recognize the hard work of all involved,” said GSK Country Manager Todd Mavende, who announced the award winners in London. “It is saving lives of Malawi’s children today and can make a difference for millions of children around the world tomorrow.”

The Rice-invented technology is a low-cost version of “continuous positive airway pressure,” or CPAP, a standard feature of most neonatal units in the developed world. CPAP helps babies that are in respiratory distress by keeping their lungs inflated so they may breathe more easily. Respiratory distress claims the lives of about 1 million African newborns each year.

With a price around $6,000, conventional CPAP machines are too expensive for hospitals in the developing world. In 2010, a team of senior students from Rice University in Houston, Texas, invented bubble CPAP as a low-cost alternative. The team members — Jocelyn Brown, Michael Pandya, Joseph Chang, Haruka Maruyama and Katie Schnelle — created the technology as part Rice 360°’s award-winning, hands-on engineering education programBeyond Traditional Borders (BTB).

In clinical trials at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, bubble CPAP was shown to increase the survival rate of newborns with respiratory distress by 27 percent. It is estimated that the technology could save the lives of 178,000 African children if implemented continentwide.

In Malawi, bubble CPAP has been renamed “Pumani,” which means “breathe easy” in Chichewa, one of the languages spoken in Malawi. Pumani costs about 15 times less than traditional CPAP, and Rice 360°, Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, the University of Malawi College of Medicine and the Malawi Ministry of Health are working together to distribute Pumani to Malawi’s 27 government hospitals.

Pumani, an award-winning low-cost device that Rice University students invented to help premature babies in Malawi breathe more easily, will be rolled out to teaching hospitals in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa, thanks to a $400,000 innovation award from pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline and London-based charity Save the Children.

“We are thrilled to be working with Friends of Sick Children in Malawi, and the University of Malawi College of Medicine to expand the Pumani program and begin replicating its success in Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering and director of both BTB and Rice 360°.

“The award money from the GSK-Save the Children Healthcare Innovation Award program will allow us to extend the reach of this life-saving technology and save thousands of lives,” said Maria Oden, director of Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and co-director of BTB.

Pumani was one of five winning projects selected GSK and Save the Children from nearly 100 applications from 29 countries.

In other news this week, a separate University of Malawi College of Medicine proposal to expand the use of Pumani was named one of eight finalists for the first-ever $1 million Caplow Children’s Prize. The prize — the largest humanitarian prize dedicated to saving children’s lives in the world today — will be awarded next month in New York.

In September, Pumani was chosen by the United Nations as one of 10 “Breakthrough Innovations That Can Save Women and Children Now.” Thanks to the designation from the UN’s Every Woman, Every Child program, Pumani was displayed for the U.N. General Assembly Sept. 23 as part of an effort to mobilize governments, multilaterals, the private sector and civil society to address the major health challenges facing women and children around the world.

Later this month, GSK and Save the Children will convene a roundtable discussion with stakeholders and policymakers to honor the Friends of Sick Children in Malawi and to discuss the impact of the award on health innovation trends in Malawi.

IV DRIP team intends to save children in the developing world

By PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

A simple design that evolved over two years and began with a mousetrap has won a team of Rice students top prize in the National Institutes of Health’s Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) competition.

It’s no longer a mousetrap, not even a better mousetrap, but a “low-cost, mechanical fluid regulator.”

“I guess the name isn’t as catchy, but the device (which no longer includes the mousetrap) is improved, and we know it will actually work in the field where it’s needed,” said Matthew Nojoomi, a junior majoring in bioengineering at Rice University and a member of the design team that created the award-winning IV DRIP (Dehydration Relief in Pediatrics).

Rice’s Team IV DRIP won in the category of technology to aid underserved populations. The Rice students will receive the $10,000 prize at the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in Seattle Sept. 25-28.

Members of the IV DRIP team have won a National Institutes of Health competition for their device to save children in the developing world. From left, Thor Walker, Melissa Yuan, Michael Pan, Erica Skerrett, Bailey Flynn, Matthew Nojoomi and Kamal Shah. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The other members of Team IV DRIP, all juniors in bioengineering, are Bailey Flynn, Michael Pan, Kamal Shah and Erica Skerrett. “The goal from the start was to regulate the amount of fluid delivered to children so we could prevent overhydration and dehydration,” said Shah, a member of the original team that organized two years ago. “It’s designed to be used in developing countries, where conditions are heart-wrenching and they may not even have electricity.”

Physicians working in Africa sparked the innovative design through discussions with Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden, who began traveling there seven years ago to seek real-world challenges for students in Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) program. Richards-Kortum is the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies, which oversees BTB. Oden is a professor in the practice of engineering education and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK).

“Physicians often told us they’d like a device to regulate IV-fluid delivery to children, who are often connected to adult IV bags,” Oden said.

A simple mechanical fluid regulator designed by students at Rice University has the potential to save lives. The device uses a lever with a movable counterweight to keep children from overhydration or dehydration. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The original design incorporated a spring-loaded mousetrap and was conceived in fall 2011 as a freshman project in ENGI 120: Introduction to Engineering Design, a course taught by Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of bioengineering education. The original team consisted of Paige Horton, Shah, Taylor Vaughn, Thor Walker and Melissa Yuan, and the students continued work in spring 2012 with Rice 360˚. In summer 2012, Shah and Yuan transported two prototypes to Malawi and Lesotho to evaluate them under field conditions. Malawi, in southeastern Africa, is among the least-developed countries in the world, with a high infant mortality rate and a life expectancy of about 50 years. Some 760,000 children in developing countries die annually of dehydration.

“IV DRIP will enable clinicians in sub-Saharan Africa to safely administer IV therapy to children, saving the lives of thousands annually,” Skerrett said.

The device is a mechanical, simple-to-operate volume regulator that uses a lever arm with a movable counterweight similar to a physician’s scale to incrementally dispense IV fluid. It uses the change in torque as the IV bag is drained to set off the spring that clamps the IV tube and stops the flow of saline solution or other prescribed fluids. Tests show the device dispenses fluid within 14 milliliters of the desired volume in increments of 50 milliliters.

Field-testing resulted in two significant changes in design. First, the original mousetrap was replaced by a safer, easier-to-use spring-loaded mechanism and equipped with two knobs to load it. Second, the working mechanism was lowered to permit easier access for short-statured health care workers.

“We are very fortunate to be part of a program that gives undergraduates the opportunity to travel to sub-Saharan Africa to obtain and incorporate end-user feedback into their devices,” Pan said

With the aid of two grants from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance and matching grants from the OEDK and the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, the team incorporated the changes into the device and created a third-generation prototype that costs about $80 to manufacture. In contrast, infusion pumps that regulate the maximum volume of fluids in an IV cost between $1,000 and $3,500.

Team IV DRIP has already received the 2012 Willy Revolution Award for Innovation in Engineering Design. Two years ago, during the first annual National Undergraduate Global Health Technologies Design Competition hosted by Rice 360˚ and Beyond Traditional Borders, the team won the People’s Choice Award for best poster. It also picked up the $500 Best Freshman Design Award at the 2012 George R. Brown Engineering Design Showcase.

“The simple design of this device gives it the potential to have a widespread effect,” said Zeynep Erim, who manages the DEBUT competition for the NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. “The ability to look at a problem in health care and create an inexpensive and viable solution for worldwide distribution is the type of thinking we want to encourage with this program.”

-Patrick Kurp is a science writer in the George R. Brown School of Engineering.

Attendees at the OEDK dedication on Sept. 5 proceed down the staircase to the new space, henceforth known as "The Kitchen Sink." Photo by An Le

Expanded Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen reopens

The best view at the expanded Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) at the Sept. 6 open house was from the bottom of the dramatic new staircase.

As students, faculty and alumni turned the corner onto the stairs, their eyes widened ever so slightly. Their looks said it all: “This is cool.”

From left, Engineering Dean Ned Thomas, Rice President David Leebron and OEDK Director Maria Oden perform the ribbon cutting at the design kitchen's re-dedication after a dramatic expansion this summer. The OEDK nearly doubled the amount of space available for student projects by renovating the basement. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The OEDK, the campus workshop where Rice students have all the tools they need to bring their design projects to life, got a much-needed expansion over the summer. The basement has been reconfigured into workspace, offices and other facilities to handle a load that has grown since the Kitchen first opened four years ago. The space was rededicated by Rice President David Leebron at a private reception for donors Sept. 5.

“We’re so thrilled to be able to offer this expanded, state-of-the-art facility to our students,” said Maria Oden, OEDK director and a professor in the practice of engineering. “Even more teams and students will be able to take advantage of these great resources.”

She anticipates the new space will take on its own identity fairly quickly. “We’d been struggling to find a good name for the expansion,” Oden said. “We finally decided there was only one possible name: The Kitchen Sink.”

“The Sink” rounds out a facility that has been a spectacular success not only for the George R. Brown School of Engineering but also for students across many disciplines on campus. It’s not unusual to encounter teams working there that include music, social science, architecture, humanities and natural science students, all of whom bring passion and unique perspectives to solve the knotty problems they take on.

“I’ve been telling people who have never been in the building to come over and look at it,” said Ned Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the Brown School of Engineering. “They come in and say, ‘Wow, this is not a classroom. This is a sandbox, with tools.’”

Engineering Dean Ned Thomas (standing at right) holds court at a "Kitchen Sink" work table at the OEDK's Sept. 6 open house. Photo by Marilee Dizon

“At the OEDK, students work on real-world engineering challenges, problems brought to us by partners in the community, industry, the Texas Medical Center and doctors in low-resource settings,” Oden said. “These open-ended engineering problems are extremely challenging and often require solutions to cross disciplinary boundaries, much like the problems our students will face in industry.

“These are much more engaging for students than problems with one correct answer that can be found at the back of the book,” she said. “Students want to work on projects where they feel they can truly make a difference. This is what we try to provide.”

“We give students the resources and say, ‘Solve the challenge.’ Sometimes they don’t, but many times they do. That’s real engineering,” Thomas said.

He noted this year’s seniors have been able to work in the OEDK for their entire time at Rice. “Their design projects have jumped up in quality and complexity and deliverables compared with what they used to be, because they’re not coming in to design as seniors for the first time,” he said. “They were doing it as freshmen, and sometimes as sophomores and juniors.”

He recalled one freshman team’s pitch to Oden at the end of the year. “They asked if they could come back and work on their project as sophomores and she said, ‘You don’t understand. I can’t give you credit.’

“They said, ‘You don’t understand. We want access. We want to keep working on this.’

“There’s something in the water here that gets people excited,” Thomas said.

Rice engineering students have come up with what may be the geekiest possible way to spell out “RICE” and are happy to plaster the puzzler on the torsos of fellow students and friends alike.

The engineer-centric code appears on a T-shirt put up for sale at the George R. Brown School of Engineering’s annual ice cream social a few weeks ago. The first hundred shirts sold out, and a quickly printed second batch was on the way to another sellout at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) open house Sept. 6.

Andrew Stegner serves customers at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where sales of a puzzling new engineering T-shirt are supporting the facility.

The students, juniors Andrew Stegner and  Will Kasper, will have more for sale at the Rice Engineering Alumni tailgate gathering at Rice Stadium before the Rice-Kansas football game Sept. 14. Proceeds from the $10 shirts support operations at the OEDK.

So what does it mean?

“We’ve taken equations and notations from science and engineering and spelled out RICE with them,” Stegner said.

“We have the Ideal Gas law. Typically PV equals nRT, and rearranged equates to R.

“We have electrical current, change in charge over change in time, dQ/dt, which is equal to I.

“Carbon, six electrons in the Bohr model, is chemically represented by C,” he said. “And we have Young’s Modulus, stress over strain, represented by E in an engineering context.”

Got that? Good. Class dismissed.

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Mike Williams
713-348-6728
mikewilliams@rice.edu 

Solar-powered sterilization technology supported by Gates Foundation

HOUSTON – (July 22, 2013) – Rice University nanotechnology researchers have unveiled a solar-powered sterilization system that could be a boon for more than 2.5 billion people who lack adequate sanitation. The “solar steam” sterilization system uses nanomaterials to convert as much as 80 percent of the energy in sunlight into germ-killing heat.

The technology is described online in a July 8 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesEarly Edition. In the paper, researchers from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) show two ways that solar steam can be used for sterilization — one setup to clean medical instruments and another to sanitize human waste.

“Sanitation and sterilization are enormous obstacles without reliable electricity,” said Rice photonics pioneer Naomi Halas, the director of LANP and lead researcher on the project, with senior co-author and Rice professor Peter Nordlander. “Solar steam’s efficiency at converting sunlight directly into steam opens up new possibilities for off-grid sterilization that simply aren’t available today.”

In a previous study last year, Halas and colleagues showed that “solar steam” was so effective at direct conversion of solar energy into heat that it could even produce steam from ice water.

“It makes steam directly from sunlight,” she said. “That means the steam forms immediately, even before the water boils.”

Halas, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, professor of physics, professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering, is one of the world’s most-cited chemists. Her lab specializes in creating and studying light-activated particles. One of her creations, gold nanoshells, is the subject of several clinical trials for cancer treatment.

Solar steam’s efficiency comes from light-harvesting nanoparticles that were created at LANP by Rice graduate student Oara Neumann, the lead author on the PNAS study. Neumann created a version of nanoshells that converts a broad spectrum of sunlight — including both visible and invisible bandwidths — directly into heat. When submerged in water and exposed to sunlight, the particles heat up so quickly they instantly vaporize water and create steam. The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent. Photovoltaic solar panels, by comparison, typically have an overall energy efficiency of around 15 percent.

When used in the autoclaves in the tests, the heat and pressure created by the steam were sufficient to kill not just living microbes but also spores and viruses. The solar steam autoclave was designed by Rice undergraduates at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and refined by Neumann and colleagues at LANP. In the PNAS study, standard tests for sterilization showed the solar steam autoclave could kill even the most heat-resistant microbes.

“The process is very efficient,” Neumann said. “For the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation program that is sponsoring us, we needed to create a system that could handle the waste of a family of four with just two treatments per week, and the autoclave setup we reported in this paper can do that.”

Halas said her team hopes to work with waste-treatment pioneer Sanivation to conduct the first field tests of the solar steam waste sterilizer at three sites in Kenya.

“Sanitation technology isn’t glamorous, but it’s a matter of life and death for 2.5 billion people,” Halas said. “For this to really work, you need a technology that can be completely off-grid, that’s not that large, that functions relatively quickly, is easy to handle and doesn’t have dangerous components. Our Solar Steam system has all of that, and it’s the only technology we’ve seen that can completely sterilize waste. I can’t wait to see how it performs in the field.”

Paper co-authors include Curtis Feronti, Albert Neumann, Anjie Dong, Kevin Schell, Benjamin Lu, Eric Kim, Mary Quinn, Shea Thompson, Nathaniel Grady, Maria Oden and Nordlander, all of Rice. The research was supported by a Grand Challenges grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and by the Welch Foundation.

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VIDEO is available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2DbVQ6AnDs

The following IMAGE is available at:

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SOLAR-1-WEB.jpg

Rice University graduate student Oara Neumann, left, and scientist Naomi Halas are co-authors of a new study about a highly efficient method of turning sunlight into heat. They expect their technology to have an initial impact as an ultra-small-scale system to treat human waste in developing nations without sewer systems or electricity. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

A copy of the PNAS paper is available at:

http://www.pnas.org/content/110/29/11677

Rice U. engineering students design new capo for guitar 

HOUSTON – (May 14, 2013) – A team of Rice University students has designed a new capo for guitar that won’t block players from making certain chords without cramping their fingers.

The capo is a clamp-like device that acts as a sixth finger across the strings.

The students’ attempt to build a better capo was inspired by Rice trustee and alumnus John Jaggers, managing general partner of Dallas venture capital firm Sevin Rosen Funds. In his spare time, Jaggers plays in an acoustic duo with his friend and fellow picker Matthew Carroll. Knowing from experience how well Rice students are trained to think about such issues, Jaggers approached engineering educators at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) to see if his idea struck a chord.

Jaggers said he and Carroll started talking about capos and decided changes were in order.

“I’ve been fairly involved in Rice and a big believer in the OEDK,” Jaggers said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is a mechanical design challenge.’” He noted that he and Carroll are not mechanical engineers. “And frankly, we don’t have a lot of time to sit around designing capos. So I thought this might be a great project,” he said.

The team of A.J. Fenton, Eric Stone, Lisa Sampson, Nicki Chamberlain-Simon and Amber Wang took four months this spring to design and build a series of prototypes that flatten out the capo, sweeping the mechanical elements back and out of the way of flying fingers while retaining all the qualities good commercial capos offer: versatility, speed of placement and the convenience of being able to clip it onto the headstock when not needed.

Few think about all the problems the guitar poses for a capo maker. The device acts as the barre, taking the place of the index finger that spans the neck in a barre chord and depressing the strings just enough to create solid contact with the frets but not so much as to throw the tones off-pitch. That lets a player change the key of a song to match one’s vocal range without changing the basic chord shapes.

The capo also has to be forgiving enough to accommodate a variety of guitar necks, which not only change from guitar to guitar, but also along the neck of a single guitar. Finally, it had better not dig into the woodwork.

“Sometimes capos hurt,” the guitar-playing Fenton said as he demonstrated a commercial unit that juts out perpendicularly from the neck. “When you play this F major 7, it presses against your index finger and it’s quite uncomfortable, especially if you want to wrap your thumb all the way around.”

“Most people figure out how to make do and curse a little bit while they play, but it’s pretty awkward,” Jaggers added.

“There are a lot of nuances we didn’t think about before we started, like the curvature of the guitar neck or the materials we had available,” Wang said. “Every single part of the prototype we had to make ourselves. So we had to be creative.”

The students’ final prototype has a two-piece, spring-loaded plastic framework created on a 3-D printer with a hard rubber strip that contacts and gently clamps the strings. While it’s not yet perfect – the capo has to be placed just so – the teammates feel they’ve come a long way in four months toward the guitarists’ goal.

They expect the capo project will continue next year, perhaps with a new team of students to work with advisers Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of engineering education, and Matthew Wettergreen, a lecturer in engineering.

-30-

Watch a video about the capo project here: http://youtu.be/HwHlp79ld9Q

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews

Related Materials:

Rice Capo Team: http://oedk.rice.edu/Content/Members/MemberPublicProfile.aspx?pageId=1063096&memberId=9266280

Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen: http://oedk.rice.edu

George R. Brown School of Engineering: http://engr.rice.edu

Images for download:

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0513_CAPO-1-WEB.jpg

Rice freshmen created a capo that sweeps the mechanical elements out of the way of the player’s fingers to make it easier to play certain chords. (Credit: Tommy LaVergne/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0513_CAPO-2-WEB.jpg

A.J. Fenton demonstrates the Rice Capo Team’s product, a prototype capo that is easy to move along the neck of a guitar while staying out of the way of flying fingers. A team of freshman engineering students invented the device. (Credit: Tommy LaVergne/Rice University)

http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/0513_CAPO-3-WEB.jpg

Guitar player John Jaggers, a Rice University trustee and alumnus, brought the idea for a new kind of capo to students at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. (Credit: Tommy LaVergne/Rice University)