Rice University seniors create smartphone app to connect heart patient, pump, doctor

A smartphone app created by students at Rice University may someday serve as the ultimate remote to help control the flow of blood through human hearts.

The Flowtastic team of Rice senior engineering students created a combined software-hardware interface that works with an Android app to monitor and even control a high-tech pump that resides in the aorta and regulates the flow of blood.

The circulatory assist pump called Aortix was invented by Houston-based Procyrion, which is is seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration to use it as a minimally invasive solution for heart-failure patients.

“It’s for that in-between phase when medication might not be enough and you don’t want to go and get a super-invasive surgery where they have to cut your chest open,” said Rice bioengineering student Benjamin Lopez. “We don’t want you to get to that very severe state and there’s nothing really out there for you right now.” As many as 2.6 million patients could benefit from such a device, according to the company.

Rice University engineering students have added smartphone-enabled controls to a heart assist pump developed by a Houston medical device company. The Flowtastic team's software and hardware would allow doctors to monitor their patients remotely and even adjust the pump speed. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The six-member Rice team also includes bioengineering students Alex Bisberg and Joshua Choi and electrical engineering students Tracy Fu, Navaneeth Ravindranath and Ernest Chan. Their advisers are Gary Woods, a professor in the practice of computer technology and electrical and computer engineering, and Eric Richardson, a lecturer in bioengineering. They are also working with Tanner Songkakul, a product development engineer at Procyrion who earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Rice in 2014.

The students have been working at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen with a Procyrion prototype, a stent attached to a tiny but powerful pump that can be inserted into the patient’s aortic vessel to assure that blood keeps flowing at the proper rate to the heart.

The Rice team’s contribution gives doctors a way to monitor the device’s performance and make adjustments when necessary, reducing the heart’s workload and helping it heal.

“Our goal has been to make a holistic and integrated system that allows the patient to connect with the doctor and also connect with their device,” Bisberg said. The Rice team built hardware that plugs into the Procyrion controller and also communicates wirelessly with the Android app. They expect the company will combine the hardware components into a single unit that the patient will carry.

The Flowtastic team, standing from left, Navaneeth Ravindranath, Ernest Chan, Alex Bisberg and Benjamin Lopez, and seated, Tracy Fu and Joshua Choi. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Bisberg said patients will be asked to enter their weight into the app every day. That information will automatically go to the doctor’s database. “Weight is a key factor in managing heart failure,” he said. “When the heart isn’t working well, the patient’s body tends to retain fluid.

“We want to be able to get a higher fluid-clearance rate from their bodies by accelerating blood flow to the kidneys and getting the liquid out of their systems.”

If a patient gains too much weight too quickly, the app would notify the doctor, according to team members. They expect the doctor will be able to adjust the pump as necessary either remotely or by plugging directly into the external electronics.

“A change in weight would trigger an email to tell the doctor what’s going on,” Chan said. “That way the doctor only has to look at that data when needed.”

The students' unique electronics plug into the heart assist pump controller. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

“We spoke to a lot of cardiologists at the Texas Heart Institute and a lot of them said this technology’s great, but it would be really nice if they could only be notified when there’s really a need for them to go in and check,” Choi said.

The system should be a great help to people who can still lead an active lifestyle, he said. “They’re not sedentary,” Chan said. “They can go out and live their lives and we can hold back the progression of the disease and prevent bad things from happening.”

While the team members will leave their project behind when they graduate in May, they said what they’ve invented may be adapted to work with hardware that monitors glucose levels or pacemakers.

Have a seat and mind the gravity.

A team of Rice University students had to think a lot about that in recent months as they designed furniture intended for use on the moon, Mars and whatever other far-flung destinations humanity may consider in the future.

At the behest of NASA, a team of five seniors in mechanical engineering designed and assembled a prototype chair and table meant to give maximum flexibility to astronauts in space or for habitats in places other than Earth.

Rice engineering students have designed a flexible chair for space habitats. Along with a custom, adjustable table, the prototypes are intended to present ideas for both space-bound astronauts and future habitats. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The furniture could serve many functions in environments where maximum flexibility with a minimum of fuss are a plus. The Lunar Lounger team assembled the pieces at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen as its capstone project. Capstone projects are required of most of the university’s senior engineering students.

“You’re going to have very limited space, so you can’t just send any furniture up,” said team member Laura Blumenschein. “And then you’ve got the partial gravity.” (Roughly one-sixth of Earth’s gravity on the moon, one-third on Mars.)

“In addition to changing how humans interact with the furniture, it’s a lot easier for astronauts to stand and work,” she said. That requires tables, in particular, to easily adjust for both standing and seated work.

The team of Blumenschein, Archit Chaba, Rey Amendola, Alex Schmidt and Dan Peera also had to consider gravity while balancing weight and strength requirements.

“We can make our furniture a lot lighter, a lot less strong (than Earth-bound designs),” Blumenschein said. “That sounds like a bad thing, but if you’re trying to reduce weight, that’s a good thing when you’re sending things to space.”

The chair and table pack flat for shipping and are designed for maximum adjustability. “The largest pieces are the foam pads,” Schmidt said. The table sits on gas springs for easy height adjustment, and connection ports allow it to be paired with other tables. The chair fits users between 5 feet and 6 feet 2 inches tall “because astronauts come in all sizes,” Peera said.

Both the chair and table are meant to be floor-mounted to keep them stable in low gravity and the chair has pin-and-hole mechanisms to adjust it for use as a traditional seat or a back chair with a knee rest. Restraining footrests allow for use in zero-gravity environments, the students said.

The Lunar Lounger team, standing from left: Laura Blumenschein, Alex Schmidt, Archit Chaba and Rey Amendola. Seated, Daniel Peera. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

The team members’ learning curve involved a study of their own habits. “We did a lot of brainstorming and research and kept a furniture journal, where we wrote about every piece of furniture we encountered for a week,” Chaba said. “So, for a couch, or a table, or a bed, we thought about each one and its design points.

“It was really interesting because we started thinking about furniture in an entirely different manner,” he said.

“Part of our mission requirement was to focus on the daily activities of the astronauts and not their sleep habits or anything like that,” Amendola said. “When we thought about what astronauts do every day and what kind of furniture they need, we narrowed down the scope of the project to chairs for sitting and tables for working, relaxing or for mealtimes.”

They got extensive help from NASA representatives, including advisers Nancy Currie, an astronaut and engineer with four space shuttle missions to her credit, and her engineering colleague Christie Sauers. “Step by step, they were there with us for the whole process,” Amendola said.

Schmidt said Currie helped gather opinions from a number of astronauts about what would be most useful in space.

“Ultimately, we’re just brainstorming the first prototypes,” Peera said. “Hopefully they’ll take this design and experiment further to finalize it and eventually get it up into orbit.”

NASA and ConocoPhillips sponsored the project.

Team D.R.A.D.I.S. was the big winner at Rice's annual Engineering Design Showcase on April 16. The team -- from left, Galen Schmidt, Jeremy Hunt, faculty adviser Gary Woods and Spencer Kent -- won the top prize for Excellence in Engineering and one of two Willy Revolution prizes for its project to develop an advanced driver assistance system to help avoid collisions. Photo by An Le/Luxe Studio Productions

Team D.R.A.D.I.S. was a double winner at the annual George R. Brown School of Engineering Design Showcase at Rice University for its development of a dynamic radar and digital imaging system to help drivers avoid accidents.

The competition held at Rice’s Tudor Fieldhouse April 16 featured the designs of 88 teams of engineering students who competed for nearly $20,000 in prizes.

The D.R.A.D.I.S. team of Rice seniors Galen Schmidt, Spencer Kent and Jeremy Hunt, all electrical engineering majors (though Schmidt has a second major in computer science), took the top prize of $5,000 for Excellence in Engineering as well as one of two Willy Revolution Awards for Innovation in Engineering Design. The second prize brought them an additional $3,000.

“It’s unreal! Really cool,” Hunt said. “I’m glad we put all the work in that we did.”

“Galen said when we won the first award (the Willy Revolution), ‘OK, that’s it! That’s great! We won a major award,’” Kent added. “We did everything we hoped to achieve.” The project was sponsored by the Rice Integrated Systems and Circuits Laboratory directed by Aydin Babakhani, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

A second Willy Revolution Award for $5,000 went to Team DermaShift.

Prizes of $1,000 went to teams for:

Excellence in Freshman Engineering Design: Comfortably Numb.

Excellence in Underclassman, Multi-Year or Club Engineering Design: RiceX.

Excellence in Capstone Engineering Design (2): Sith Putter; ESP.

A prize of $750 was awarded for:

Best Interdisciplinary Engineering Design: IncuBaby.

Prizes of $500 went to teams in the following categories:

Best Conceptual or Computational Modeling Engineering Design: Charles Ho.

Best Technology for Low-Resource Settings Design: Club EWB Nicaragua No. II.

Best Energy-Related Engineering Design: Team BubbleGHUM.

Best Medical Device Technology: r.ARM.

Best Environment and Sustainability Engineering Design: Electric Avenue.

Best Computational Technologies for Health and Wellness Design: Team Aura.

Best Gaming, Creative or Innovative Technology: Holster Hotshots.

Best Aerospace or Transportation Technology: Runway Boys.

People’s Choice: Hands Omni.

The annual public event put on by the George R. Brown School of Engineering and the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen features senior capstone design and other projects by Rice undergraduates. Read about all the participating teams at http://oedk.rice.edu/showcase.

If the Rice University freshmen on the engineering design team Comfortably Numb have it their way, children will be less fearful and feel less pain when they go to the doctor’s office for a shot.

The trio of freshmen has created a device to ease the pain of an injection. Their device numbs the skin prior to a shot by producing a rapid chemical reaction to cool the patient’s skin.

The team, made up of computer science major Greg Allison, bioengineering major Andy Zhang and mechanical engineering major Mike Hua, currently has a functioning prototype that has shown to produce a measurable numbing effect in 60 seconds, which in turn reduces the pain from an injection.

“Our (lab) device is 3-D-printed and consists of two sealed chambers containing the chemical ammonium nitrate and water,” Hua said. “A simple twisting motion moves the chambers into alignment to allow the chemicals to flow through the chamber to produce a rapid endothermic reaction. We then numb the skin by contacting the device’s metal surface to the patient’s skin.”

The team said that current solutions are either ineffective, because they don’t numb well enough, or they take too long. The team noted that a commonly used medicated topical patch takes about an hour to work. “Our solution works on the order of seconds and minutes,” Zhang said.

“We are targeting anyone who has to get an injection, which is nearly everyone,” Allison said.  ”But the device is especially applicable to people who are more susceptible to pain,” such as the elderly and children, he said. He also said it’s intended for use during procedures “where you have to get shots in more sensitive areas of the body, such as the face or the groin.”

The team also recognized that other applications of this project could be ear piercings, swelling reduction and tattooing, although they are currently not addressing them at this phase.

“We looked into all sorts of methods for numbing, both quick and long-term, chemicals, using ice packs — which is similar to what we’re using now,” Hua said. “We explored everything that surrounded the problem before we even began brainstorming.”

“At the end of the day, what we’re creating is a self-contained device with a very cold contact surface, and there are many applications for that,” Allison said.

“At the end of the day, what we’re creating is a self-contained device with a very cold contact surface, and there are many applications for that,” Allison said.

Some of the solutions the team researched were very technical and required a materials science degree or skills the freshmen hadn’t yet learned. “That’s kind of the amazing thing about our project because we don’t have these incredibly refined skills in certain areas; that meant that we had to think of very simple solutions,” Allison said. “Being limited in that way led to something that is very novel and innovative but at the same time simple and elegant.

The team designed the device to be single-use rather than reusable because cleaning it for each use and resetting the device would be cumbersome for a nurse, and injections are such a common procedure that it’s much easier to have a single-use device.

“We’ve done simulated trials where we basically hold a pen up against a ruler and press down 5 millimeters — we know what that feels like — apply the device, press it down 5 millimeters again and gauge based on the comparative pain scale, which is something hospitals already use, ” Allison said.

“The materials that we use are relatively inexpensive and found in abundance:  plastic, rubber and metal,” Zhang said. “The materials for one of these cost about a quarter, and then we just had to do estimates based on how much manufacturing would cost. We compared our device to similar things already in production, and we’ve estimated the cost at about $2.”

Comfortably Numb was guided through its design project in Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen in the fall semester by Ann Saterbak, Bioengineering’s director of laboratory instruction, and in the spring semester by Jane Grande-Allen, the Isabel C. Cameron Professor of Bioengineering.

“We meet with Dr. Grande-Allen every Tuesday,” Zhang said. “We show her our progress and bounce ideas off of her. A lot of our ideas came from our discussions with her.”

“We meet with Dr. Grande-Allen every Tuesday,” Zhang said. “We show her our progress and bounce ideas off of her. A lot of our ideas came from our discussions with her, especially the use of chemicals. She actually let us into her lab and had her graduate students help us create these (chemical) reactions to see what was truly going on and for us to understand the reactions.”

The team also credits Dr. Wettergreen, who serves as a faculty mentor and he has been a huge part of the success of their project, as far as ideas and pushing them to have high standards, Allison said.

The team is currently in the process of applying for a provisional patent for the device, and the students hope to continue their work together in their spare time when they return to Rice as sophomores.

“As a team, we just want to follow the project, because we think it has a lot of potential. I think that’s what drew us to this specific project,” Allison said. “We haven’t really discussed yet whether we’re going dedicate to making this a company, but it’s something we’re open to.”

inShare