2016-17 Senior Design Projects

Posture Correction Device with Haptic Feedback for Parkinson’s Disease

Team Members
Dakota Anderson, Noah Doyle, Maxwell Hultquist, and Hannah Marti, Biomedical Engineering

Advisor
Smitha Rao, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
Department of Biomedical Engineering

Project Overview
Parkinson’s disease involves the gradual degeneration of dopamine-producing nerve cells which control body movement. Symptoms include freezing gait, tremors, bradykinesia, and postural instability. Appropriate feedback can correct postural instability, in turn improving mobility and decreasing risk of injury. The proposed system monitors posture and provides haptic feedback for posture correction. The system uses dynamic data from onboard sensors and can be personalized to patients’ needs. It is safe, easy to use, low cost, and usable by a multitude of individuals with motorcontrol-related conditions.


Rapid Prototyping of Ultrasound Elastography Phantom

Team Members
Madeline Faust, Corinn Gehrke, Morgan Herzog, Karry Modolo, and Armani Salary, Biomedical Engineering

Advisors
Jingfeng Jiang and Rupak Rajachar, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
Materialise

Project Overview
Ultrasound elastography phantoms evaluate and calibrate the performance of ultrasound devices. Elastography is a method that performs digital palpation of pathology. Existing ultrasound phantoms are often not complex enough to challenge imaging devices. Weaknesses in ultrasound elastography methods means ultrasounds cannot be truly tested without costly clinical trials. More complex phantoms need to be developed to challenge ultrasound elastography devices. To achieve this, additive manufacturing is being explored using cheap, polymer materials that mimic the elastic modulus and density of normal and cancerous breast tissues. This project focuses on applying this technology to model invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and normal breast tissues.


Customizing Transcatheter Nitinol Stents for Treatment of Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome in Infants

Team Members
Emma Davis, Kat Farkas, Amanda Gogola, and Ami Kling, Biomedical Engineering

Advisors
Jeremy Goldman and Smitha Rao, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
Spectrum Health Innovations—Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital

Project Overview
Hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) is a congenital heart defect that is mainly characterized by the underdevelopment of the left ventricle. Currently, multiple open heart surgeries are performed to correct this problem. Our team’s goal was to help eliminate the need for the first surgery by designing and testing catheter deployment of a modified nitinol stent with improved patient matching. The idea of deforming the stent with a microsphere to better fit anatomically relevant infant heart geometries was explored, as well as the feasibility of the use of this deformed shape.


Tooth Movement Simulation Instrument

Team Members
Brendan McNamara, Alex Moore, Jason Smith, Biomedical Engineering, and Chad Pollock, Electrical Engineering

Advisors
Megan Frost and Bruce Lee, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
3M

Project Overview
3M is developing orthodontic appliances to move teeth in order to correct malocclusions. Testing these orthodontic appliances is necessary to prepare them for in vivo studies and understand the appliances’ capabilities. The current testing method requires high processing temperatures that create unwanted stress on the appliances, and the measurements are not quantitative. The team created a prototype that demonstrates a more realistic tooth movement as well as a quantitative measurement of the displacement. This was achieved by creating a copolymer blend to lower the processing temperatures while simulating the tooth-tissue interface. The displacement is measured quantitatively through image cross-correlation using images taken by a camera system.


Contrast Valve Characterization

Team Members
Jacob Altscheffel, Sydney Chaney, Miguel Solis, Biomedical Engineering, and Zachary Garavet, Computer Engineering

Advisor
Sean Kirkpatrick, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
ACIST Medical Systems

Project Overview
ACIST manufactures high pressure contrast injection pumps and the high volume disposable kits that go with them. As ACIST has grown, additional tools and contract manufacturers have come on board to help sustain consumable demands. While the designs are the same, they periodically show differences in performance. ACIST has tasked our team with designing a prototype to test the quality of each manufacturer’s syringe valve, where the most variance in performance is shown.


Combination Patient Warming and Transfer Device

Team Members
Jenna Burns, Electrical Engineering; Kemin Fena, Elizabeth Martin, Zach Nelson, and Rebecca Rutherford, Biomedical Engineering

Advisor
Orhan Soykan, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
3M

Project Overview
Nurses face two main challenges when moving a patient. Studies show that nurses naturally lose their strength over time, and a greater number of patients are becoming more obese, making them harder to lift. The combination of these factors can injure nurses on the job. This project focuses on moving a patient into and out of a surgical suite. These suites tend to be cold and can lower the patient’s core body temperature. It is important to warm the patient so they maintain their normal core temperature. Keeping the patient warm helps prevent illness. Our team has created a working prototype of a heated patient transfer device.


Instrumentation of Manual Medical Devices

Team Members
Derryl Poynor, Justin Harthorn, and Corey Fase, Biomedical Engineering; Gabriel Wykle, Electrical Engineering

Advisors
Jeremy Goldman and Feng Zhao, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
Boston Scientific

Project Overview
The most common vascular catheterization techniques require manual manipulation of an intravascular guidewire by a physician, who receives feedback from qualitative real-time X-ray imaging and physical resistance. There is currently no reliable method to measure the forces generated during manual manipulation of the guidewire. The objective of this project is to instrument a modified torque clamp to quantify the physician’s interaction with an intravascular guidewire for additional electronic operator assessment. We anticipate the real-time, quantitative feedback of the force applied down the shaft of a guidewire will help train physicians to prevent vessel perforation and tip failure from excessive applied force.


Assessment of Methods to Visualize and Remove Biofilm Layer on Orthopedic Implants during Surgery

Team Members
Breeanne Spalding, Carly Joseph, Jonathan Kelley, and Joy Collard, Biomedical Engineering

Advisor
Megan Frost, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsors
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Dr. Jennifer Bow, Surgical Consultant

Project Overview
Each year, nearly one million hip and knee arthroplasties are performed in the United States. An artificial joint can significantly improve a patient’s quality of life, but failure of the prosthetic can result in patient morbidity and a gross increase in medical expenses. A major cause of failure is infection, which occurs when a bacterial biofilm develops on the implant. Bacterial strains that grow into biofilms are generally less susceptible to antibiotics and host defenses than the same organisms in their planktonic forms. This continuation project seeks to visualize mature, infectious biofilms on orthopedic implants and to determine the most effective method to remove these biofilms during surgery.


Blubber-Only Implantable Satellite Tracking Device for Humpback Whales

Team Members
Justin Batchelor, Hannah Fisher, Paul Shelcusky, and Nathaniel Smith, Biomedical Engineering

Advisors
Rupak Rajachar and Bruce Lee, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Project Overview
The goal of our project is to create a novel blubber only implantable satellite tracking tag for monitoring whale movement patterns over extended periods of time. Current tags are known for causing irritation issues in the whales that lead to premature rejection of the tags. Our team worked to design a tag that would be less invasive and more biocompatible than existing products. This meant designing smaller tags with design attributes that would promote better adhesion in a more biologically sensitive manner. We proposed 10 designs, of which six were prototyped and four were tested and analyzed.


Enhanced Measurement and Analysis of Gait Disturbances

Team Members
Justine Reed-Sandrum and Dex Driggers, Biomedical Engineering; Sonja Hedblom, Mechanical Engineering; Nic Schweikart, Computer Engineering

Advisor
Jingfeng Jiang, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
Aspirus Keweenaw

Project Overview
With this project, our team seeks to reduce the time duration of full patient recovery from hip and/or knee orthopedic surgery. As a result of infrequent physical therapy appointments, the recovery of postoperative patients relies heavily on unsupervised practice outside of the clinic. When patients exercise out of the clinic, they do not have professional gait corrective feedback readily available. We designed a device to monitor a patient’s upper body and legs. It provides real-time scientific gait feedback, logs data of a patient’s progress, encourages proper gait form, and ultimately accelerates recovery


Objective Method to Measure Chronic Pain

Team Members
Jacob Brown, Kari Helminen, and Thomas Spicuzza, Biomedical Engineering; Adam Reese, Electrical Engineering

Advisor
Keat Ghee Ong, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
Medtronic

Project Overview
For many years, pain level in chronic pain patients has been determined by asking the patient to report their pain level. Whether this pain is reported by choosing a pain level on a scale of 1-10, or by choosing an image of a face that describes their pain level, the patient’s subjective input has been crucial. Our team’s goal, with the help of our sponsor, is to design a pain measurement protocol that reports a patient’s pain level with minimal subjective input from the patient. Through a wearable device, the use of computer programming, and real patient data, an objective pain measure can be calculated to allow physicians to better treat their patients. 


Delivering and Fixing a Lead into the LV Myocardium

Team Members
Ross Michaels, Jared Johnson, Sean Casey, and Emily Morin, Biomedical Engineering

Advisors
Rupak Rajachar and Feng Zhao, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor
Medtronic

Project Overview
The general design for this project is to create a system in which a lead is delivered from the epicardial surface through the myocardium, but not penetrating into the LV chamber. This requires a delivery system and a method to penetrate the epicardial layer and then direct the lead to the endocardial surface. Our goal is to accomplish this with a minimally invasive surgical approach.