News and Announcements

  • Thursday, September 20, 2012 9:56 AM | Anonymous

    Student team, Helping Hands, featured in the fall 2012 issue of Shriner's Hospital Leaders in Care magazine. 
  • Thursday, September 20, 2012 9:37 AM | Anonymous

    Check out alum Jocelyn Brown and the bCPAP device featured on the front page of the USAID's website.
  • Thursday, August 09, 2012 6:04 PM | Anonymous

    They got honorable mention for their "Neonatal Apnea Monitor for the Developing World" at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering - DEBUT competition.

    Babalung: A Neonatal Apnea Monitor for the Developing World

    1st Honorable Mention- Technology to Aid Underserved Populations and Individuals with Disabilities Category

    Apnea is common in premature infants, who often lack the neurological development to breathe correctly on their own. Monitors used in hospitals the United States are power-intensive and extraordinarily expensive, leaving primary health care centers in the developing world relying on nurses to keep vigil. Our Babalung Apnea Monitor detects apneic episodes in premature infants for under $35, treats the infants as soon as apnea is detected, and alerts health care workers to emergency situations.

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  • Friday, August 03, 2012 11:01 AM | Anonymous

    Team mobileVision’s smartphone-based device beats nearly 500 other entries for $10,000 prize

    A team of Rice University alumni has won Texas Instruments’ fifth annual Analog Design Contest. Team mobileVision took the $10,000 Engibous Prize this week for its invention of a device that allows untrained individuals to take snapshots of a retina outside of a clinical environment for remote diagnosis.

    MobileVision team

    The mobileVision senior capstone design team won the Engibous Prize in a competition sponsored by Texas Instruments this week. Members, from left, are: front, George Chen and Minhee Park; rear, Kevin Beale, Richard Lattimer and Adam Samaniego. Photo by Doni Howard

    The smartphone-based screening device allows people in undeveloped countries to be diagnosed for vision problems and such ocular diseases as glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Ophthalmologists can then view the images and diagnose patients from afar.

    Team members are Richard Latimer, Adam Samaniego, Kevin Beale, George Chen and Minhee Park, all of whom graduated from Rice in May. Latimer and Samaniego will continue their work on the project as Rice graduate students. Team advisers are Ashutosh Sabharwal, a professor, and Ashok Veeraraghavan, an assistant professor, both of electrical and computer engineering.

    “The team demonstrated unique leadership and creative problem-solving skills necessary to address an important health care challenge worldwide,” Sabharwal said. “As part of the Scalable Health Initiative at Rice, mobileVision is a crucial step forward to realizing inexpensive and portable vision screening for a large number of vision disorders. We are continuing our work on mobileVision to bring it to the field in the near future.”

    Award ceremony

    Rice University graduate students Richard Latimer, left, and Adam Samaniego, second from left, accept the Engibous Prize in Dallas this week. With them are Texas Instruments employees, from third left, Brian Crutcher, Kausalya Palavesam, Gene Frantz and Hagop Kozanian. Photo courtesy Texas Instruments

    Nearly 500 participants from 40 accredited engineering schools entered the contest, which is named for former TI Chairman Thomas Engibous. Finalists representing a dozen universities presented their projects to a panel of judges July 30 at Texas Instruments’ headquarters in Dallas.

    The team, which built its device as its senior capstone design project at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, also won the Texas Instruments Award for Engineering Design at this year’s Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase and Poster Competition.

    Second and third place went to teams from Oregon State University and the University of Toronto, respectively. The People’s Choice award went to the University of Central Florida.

    Rice’s Electric Owl design team won last year’s Engibous Prize for unmanned aerial vehicle to explore  Mars.

  • Tuesday, July 31, 2012 9:03 AM | Anonymous
    Don Graves, executive director of President Barack Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, spent time July 25 at Rice University’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. President David Leebron and Associate Dean of Engineering Bart Sinclair gave him a tour of the student engineering facility and, with other university officials, engaged in a discussion of how Rice is encouraging entrepreneurship through the senior design projects that are required of most Rice engineering students.


    Also present for the meeting were Vice Provost for Research Vicki Colvin, Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship Managing Director Brad Burke, Rice Center for Engineering Leadership Director Mark Embree and Vice President for Public Affairs Linda Thrane.

    Pictured: From left, Danielle Evers, the council’s associate director; Graves; Kinder Institute for Urban Research Co-Director Stephen Klineberg; and Leebron listen as engineering student Jade Juzswik demonstrates her summer design team’s low-cost pediatric goniometer, which is used by physical therapists to measure joint angles. (Photo by Jeff Fitlow)

  • Monday, July 30, 2012 12:11 PM | Anonymous

    Rice’s student-designed device to help babies breathe wins more support

    Saving Lives at Birth funds low-cost bCPAP to help newborns in respiratory distress

    HOUSTON – (July 30, 2012) – Rice University’s low-cost, student-designed device that helps newborns in respiratory distress is one of three projects nominated this month to receive a grant of up to $2 million from the Saving Lives at Birth partners to speed deployment of the technology in Malawi in southern Africa.

    Bubble continuous positive airway pressure undefined or bCPAP undefined devices are commonly used in the developed world to treat infants whose respiratory systems are underdeveloped or compromised by infection. However, at $6,000 each, the devices are often too expensive for hospitals in the developing world. The bCPAP device developed by Rice can be built for $160 and delivers the same therapeutic pressure as devices in hospitals in the developed world. Rice’s bCPAP device, a project in Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders initiative, was developed at Rice’sOshman Engineering Design Kitchen by seniors as their engineering design capstone project in 2010.

    We are very grateful for the opportunity to continue the important work we began with Saving Lives at Birth seed funding to evaluate and implement the low-cost bCPAP device in Malawi,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and director of the Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies. “Preliminary data from our clinical trial at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, suggest that our bCPAP device can significantly improve survival for infants struggling with respiratory distress. We look forward to bringing this life-saving device to all central and district hospitals in Malawi with transition-to-scale funding.”

    Saving Lives at Birth is sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada and the U.K.’s Department for International Development. Last year, Rice’s low-cost bCPAP device was one of 19 projects selected by Saving Lives at Birth for seed-grant funding. The device competed with more than 600 submissions. This year, Rice’s bCPAP device was among three of 14 applicants nominated to receive a larger “transition-to-scale” grant. The additional funds are intended to scale up the technology for widespread deployment in Malawi. Rice will now enter into negotiations before the award is finalized. The grants are typically worth $2 million.

    With seed funding, Rice 360° and its partners, the University of Malawi, Baylor College of Medicine and 3rd Stone Design, evaluated the low-cost bCPAP device in a clinical trial at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital this year, developed training programs, designed a commercial prototype and held a countrywide stakeholders meeting to gather feedback on the device. With transition-to-scale funding, the team, joined by MD Anderson Cancer Center, will build on this work to implement the device in all central and district hospitals in Malawi, develop a campaign to educate mothers about bCPAP and assess the device’s cost-effectiveness. An estimated 178,000 babies could be saved each year if the device is disseminated throughout Africa, Richards-Kortum said.

    In February, original student design team member Jocelyn Brown, now a staff member at Rice 360°, was one of four representatives of academic institutions invited to the White House to present at an “Innovations in Global Health” event. Also on the original student design team were Rice alumni Michael Pandya, Joseph Chang, Haruka Maruyama and Katie Schnelle.

    “This award really validates what we’ve already accomplished,” said Brown, who helped to administer the clinical study in Malawi and will return in August to complete the work. “We’re thrilled to be able to go back and tell the doctors and nurses we’ve been working with that we’re continuing, and that we can bring bCPAP to more hospitals.”

    Earlier this month, Rice alumna Jordan Schermerhorn was on the road in Africa as the winner of a competition to travel on a reporting trip with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. While in Malawi, Schermerhorn and Kristof visited Rice students who were “tasked with field-testing health technologies developed in the classroom.” In her blog for the New York Times, Schermerhorn also wrote about the clinical trial in Blantyre.

    For more information on Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies, go to www.rice360.rice.edu.

    -30-

    For more information on the award or to schedule an interview with Richards-Kortum, contact David Ruth, director of national media relations at Rice, at david@rice.edu or 713-348-6327.

    This bCPAP device program is made possible through the generous support of the Saving Lives at Birth partners: the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and the World Bank. “The Saving Lives at Birth and Rice University bCPAP device: Life-saving Respiratory Support for Infants in Malawi” program is managed and co-funded by Rice University.

    Photos for download:

     

    http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/CPAP-team-web.jpg

    From left, Rice alumni Michael Pandya, Jocelyn Brown, Katie Schnelle, Haruka Maruyama and Joseph Chang showed components of their bubble continuous positive airway pressure device, developed in 2010 to help infants recover from respiratory infections. (Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

     

     

    http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/CPAP-nurse-web.jpg

    A nurse at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, fits the bCPAP device developed by Rice University students to an infant. The Saving Lives at Birth program has committed funding to help develop the device that aids newborns struggling with respiratory distress. (Credit: Jocelyn Brown/Rice University)

    View Jocelyn Brown’s video from Malawi, presented at a White House global health event in February:http://youtu.be/5KTyiAMvHI8

    Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews

    Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for “best value” among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.


  • Monday, July 30, 2012 10:45 AM | Anonymous

    Saving Lives at Birth funds low-cost bCPAP to help newborns in respiratory distress

    bCPAP

    A nurse at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, fits the bCPAP device developed by Rice University students to an infant. The Saving Lives at Birth program has committed funding to help develop the device that aids newborns struggling with respiratory distress. (Photo by Jocelyn Brown)

    Rice University’s low-cost, student-designed device that helps newborns in respiratory distress is one of three projects nominated this month to receive a grant of up to $2 million from the Saving Lives at Birth partners to speed deployment of the technology in Malawi in southern Africa.

    Bubble continuous positive airway pressure undefined or bCPAP undefined devices are commonly used in the developed world to treat infants whose respiratory systems are underdeveloped or compromised by infection. However, at $6,000 each, the devices are often too expensive for hospitals in the developing world. The bCPAP device developed by Rice can be built for $160 and delivers the same therapeutic pressure as devices in hospitals in the developed world. Rice’s bCPAP device, a project in Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders initiative, was developed at Rice’sOshman Engineering Design Kitchen by seniors as their engineering design capstone project in 2010.

    “We are very grateful for the opportunity to continue the important work we began with Saving Lives at Birth seed funding to evaluate and implement the low-cost bCPAP device in Malawi,” said Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice’s Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and director of the Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies. “Preliminary data from our clinical trial at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, suggest that our bCPAP device can significantly improve survival for infants struggling with respiratory distress. We look forward to bringing this life-saving device to all central and district hospitals in Malawi with transition-to-scale funding.”

    Saving Lives at Birth is sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government of Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada and the U.K.’s Department for International Development. Last year, Rice’s low-cost bCPAP device was one of 19 projects selected by Saving Lives at Birth for seed-grant funding. The device competed with more than 600 submissions. This year, Rice’s bCPAP device was among three of 14 applicants nominated to receive a larger “transition-to-scale” grant. The additional funds are intended to scale up the technology for widespread deployment in Malawi. Rice will now enter into negotiations before the award is finalized. The grants are typically worth $2 million.

    Team

    From left, Rice alumni Michael Pandya, Jocelyn Brown, Katie Schnelle, Haruka Maruyama and Joseph Chang showed components of their bubble continuous positive airway pressure device, developed in 2010 to help infants recover from respiratory infections. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

    With seed funding, Rice 360° and its partners, the University of Malawi, Baylor College of Medicine and 3rd Stone Design, evaluated the low-cost bCPAP device in a clinical trial at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital this year, developed training programs, designed a commercial prototype and held a countrywide stakeholders meeting to gather feedback on the device. With transition-to-scale funding, the team, joined by MD Anderson Cancer Center, will build on this work to implement the device in all central and district hospitals in Malawi, develop a campaign to educate mothers about bCPAP and assess the device’s cost-effectiveness. An estimated 178,000 babies could be saved each year if the device is disseminated throughout Africa, Richards-Kortum said.

    In February, original student design team member Jocelyn Brown, now a staff member at Rice 360°, was one of four representatives of academic institutions invited to the White House to present at an “Innovations in Global Health” event. Also on the original student design team were Rice alumni Michael Pandya, Joseph Chang, Haruka Maruyama and Katie Schnelle.

    “This award really validates what we’ve already accomplished,” said Brown, who helped to administer the clinical study in Malawi and will return in August to complete the work. “We’re thrilled to be able to go back and tell the doctors and nurses we’ve been working with that we’re continuing, and that we can bring bCPAP to more hospitals.”

    Earlier this month, Rice alumna Jordan Schermerhorn was on the road in Africa as the winner of a competition to travel on a reporting trip with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. While in Malawi, Schermerhorn and Kristof visited Rice students who were “tasked with field-testing health technologies developed in the classroom.” In her blog for the New York Times, Schermerhorn also wrote about the clinical trial in Blantyre.

  • Tuesday, July 03, 2012 11:17 AM | Anonymous

    Alumna Jordan Schermerhorn '12 authored this column about her travels in southern Africa with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Kristof's column about Africa's economic and social growth mentions that he is traveling with Schermerhorn.

    New York Times

    http://nyti.ms/MoACj1



    Africa on the rise
    Greensboro News-Record (N.C.) (This column also appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Qatar Tribune and AllKenyaNews.com.)
    http://bit.ly/R0kNy5


    The NYTimes states: Jordan Schermerhorn, a recent graduate of Rice University, is the 2012 “Win A Trip” winner. She is currently traveling with Nick through parts of southern Africa. In her third post she writes about how farmers in Malawi are adapting to agricultural changes that threaten their livelihoods.

  • Wednesday, June 13, 2012 12:27 PM | Anonymous

    This ‘mousetrap’ may save lives


    BY PATRICK KURP

    Special to the Rice News

    Instead of building a better mousetrap, a team of Rice University freshmen took a mousetrap and built a better way to treat dehydration among children in the developing world.

    “The goal was to regulate the amount of fluid delivered to children so we could prevent over-hydration and under-hydration,” said Melissa Yuan, a member of the IV DRIP (Dehydration Relief in Pediatrics) team and a mechanical engineering major. “It’s designed to be used in severely underdeveloped parts of the world, where conditions can be pretty primitive and they may not even have electricity.”

    The challenge that sparked the innovative design has been mentioned by physicians working in Africa since Rice’s Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden began traveling there six years ago in search of real-world design challenges for students in Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders program. Richards-Kortum is the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and director of Rice 360°: Institute for Global Health Technologies, which oversees Beyond Traditional Borders. Oden is a professor in the practice of engineering education and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.

    IV Drip team

    Rice University freshmen created a device to regulate IV flow for children in developing countries. Members of the IV DRIP team (from left) are Thor Walker, Kamal Shah, Taylor Vaughn and Melissa Yuan. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

    “Many times physicians have mentioned to us that they would like a tool that can better moderate IV-fluid delivery to children, who are often connected to adult IV-bags,” Oden said. “In understaffed medical settings, monitoring IV-fluid delivery to patients can be a challenge. At the same time, it is of critical importance that the appropriate amount of fluid is delivered.”

    The device designed by the IV DRIP team is inexpensive; it costs about $20 to manufacture. It’s a mechanical, durable, autonomous and 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.

    The system uses the change in torque as an IV bag is drained of fluid to set off a mousetrap-like spring that clamps the IV tube and cuts off the flow of saline solution or other prescribed fluids. Tests have shown the device dispenses fluid within 12 milliliters of the desired volume in increments of 50 milliliters.

    Melissa Yuan and IV Drip

    Rice University freshman Melissa Yuan checks an IV bag during tests of IV DRIP, a mechanical device to regulate fluids for young patients in developing countries. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

    “We knew we needed something simple and reliable, not high-tech or terribly sophisticated,” Yuan said. “There’s nothing digital about it, nothing electrical or fancy.”

    The team includes chemical engineering major Paige Horton, bioengineering majors Kamal Shah and Thor Walker and mechanical engineering major Taylor Vaughn. Rebecca Hernandez, a senior in bioengineering, serves as the team’s apprentice leader representing the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership.

    Walker emphasized the old-fashioned engineering of the device: “There’s nothing revolutionary about this thing. It was matter of determining the right weight for the steel counterweight, which is 812 grams, and calibrating everything else correctly.”

    The device can be mounted on a wall or attached with clamps to a portable hospital IV pole. The most time-consuming part of assembling the device was calibrating the counterweight and determining the precise spacing of the notches the counterweight falls into and holds as the fluid drains, he said.

    IV Drip

    The mechanical IV DRIP invented by students at Rice University takes cues from mousetraps for its ability to halt the flow of fluid through an intravenous line without electricity. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

    “Then the clamp goes off and it folds the tubing in a V-shape, the way you would crimp a garden hose to make the water stop coming out,” Walker said.

    This summer Shah and Yuan will transport four of their prototypes to Malawi and Lesotho, respectively, to test them under practical 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 1.5 million children in developing countries die annually of dehydration.

    The device was conceived in the fall of 2011 as a freshman project in the Engineering 120, Introduction to Engineering Design course taught by Ann Saterbak, a professor in the practice of bioengineering education and director of laboratory instruction in Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering. Team IV DRIP has already received the 2012 Willy Revolution Award for Innovation in Engineering Design, and its members will share a $2,000 prize.

    In April, during the second 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. They also picked up the $500 Best Freshman Design award at the 2012 George R. Brown Engineering Design Showcase.

  • Thursday, May 31, 2012 1:09 PM | Anonymous

    An invention with impact

    BY PATRICK KURP
    Special to the Rice News

    What do you get when you combine a slingshot, a fish tank, a stack of 2-by-4s and five engineering students determined to help the United States Air Force?

    For Team CADET at Rice University, the answer is a device to stop high-velocity projectiles without destroying them. With the Air Force’s current methods, artillery shells are destroyed beyond recovery. The Air Force wants to know more about their behavior as they accelerate and decelerate.

    Team CADET

    Students prepare to test elements of their Controllable Acceleration-Deceleration Equipment Tester, developed at the request of the Air Force. From left: John Stretton, Duncan Eddy, Tremayne Kaseman and William Li.

    “The challenge was to simulate high-acceleration impacts in a nondestructive way,” said Duncan Eddy, a junior in mechanical engineering and member of the Controllable Acceleration-Deceleration Equipment Tester design team. “The problem turned out to have a hands-on, mechanical engineering focus.”

    The other team members, Autumn Allen, Tremayne Kaseman, William Li and John Stretton, recently earned their degrees in mechanical engineering from Rice. Their adviser is Andrew Dick, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

    Currently, the Air Force simulates deceleration by firing cannons into walls. The strategy is expensive and the sensor module and target are typically destroyed in the process. Team CADET’s goal was to sustain deceleration for at least 10 milliseconds, and without destruction. They machined a cylinder of aircraft-gauge aluminum and sealed a digital accelerometer inside. Next, they built a 14-foot wooden frame to hold a track fashioned from angle iron.

    On one end, they attached a slingshot made from surgical tubing; on the other, above the track, they fitted a 20-gallon fish tank with transparent plastic. Into the bottom of the tank they drilled a line of 40 holes and sealed them with a removable rubber sheet.

    Tremayne Kaseman

    Tremayne Kaseman stretches the slingshot to the max during a test of Team CADET's device.

    When the cylinder holding the accelerometer is fired with the slingshot, reaching a maximum velocity of about 50 miles per hour, the sheet is pulled off and the water is released from the tank. The falling water slows the cylinder, and the rate of deceleration is measured and recorded on the digital device. The cylinder and its contents remain undamaged and the test can be repeated indefinitely.

    “Nothing is destroyed. You just fill the tank with water again and reload the slingshot,” said Eddy, who stressed that the prototype can be scaled to any size.

    We started last fall with a ton of different ideas but ended up with a plan that is simple and inexpensive, and the scale can easily be changed – a bigger tank, more water, more holes, a longer track, a bigger slingshot,” Eddy said.

    In April, the team visited Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and met with members of the Munitions Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory, which commissioned the project. The team presented a video demonstration and PowerPoint explanation, and submitted their 65-page final report.

    “They liked what they saw and said they were interested in exploring the idea further. We know we’ve created something entirely new. The parts are not new but the combination is. Also undefined and this is important undefined we came in under budget,” Eddy said.

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    About Mike Williams

    Mike Williams is a senior media relations specialist in Rice University's Office of Public Affairs.

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