Four seniors took their Senior Design project to competition at the world’s largest medical devices conference.
Left to right: Lindsey Nguy, Patrick Sullivan, Karl Dedow, and Natalia Mejia at the Design of Medical Devices Conference.
Four seniors took their Senior Design project to competition at the world’s largest medical devices conference. Karl Dedow, Lindsey Nguy, Natalia Mejia, and Patrick Sullivan, also known as Senior Design Team 9, competed in the Design of Medical Devices Conference’s 3rd Annual International Student Design Showcase alongside 20 other teams of undergraduate and graduate students in Minneapolis, Minnesota, earlier this month.
Senior Design Team 9 has been working on a thermoelectric cooling device for cryotherapy, a project sponsored by Professor Ken Diller.
The purpose of the device is to promote healing after orthopedic surgeries. Currently ice packs or cryotherapy units that require ice or water are used to promote healing of tissues. However, there are drawbacks to ice packs and cryotherapy units, including unreliability in precisely controlling temperature, and in some cases, they can cause injuries such as skin necrosis and intense ischemia.
Senior Design Team 9 is using thermoelectric coolers, the same technology that heats car seats during winter months, to create a prototype that can provide accurate temperature control, easily alternate between heating and cooling to better promote healing, and be applied directly on the skin at the therapeutic site, all without the use of water or ice.
Thus far the team has discovered that the novel thermoelectric cooling device can optimize therapeutic effects. In addition to precise temperature controls that could lead to more effective treatment, the battery-operated device eliminates the need for circulating ice water, making it lightweight.
“Attending the showcase was a great opportunity to network and see what design teams from other universities are working on,” said Patrick Sullivan.
The team’s next steps are to conduct more experiments to gather more quantifiable evidence to better understand the sensitivity in temperature changes.
