With the Glia template, the stethoscope can be made in less than three hours and costs less than $3 to produce anyone with a 3D printer and access to ABS– a plastic used to make garden chairs and Lego – can create the device.
For me, the formative experience was that I was working overseas during the war in the Gaza Strip and when I was trying to practice, I wasn't able to practice properly because there were no stethoscopes - There was once stethoscope between ten doctors trying to deal with almost a hundred patients. It was my stethoscope that I brought from Canada. So, after that I thought there has to be a better way to deal with this - a way to reduce the cost and maintain the quality. This is the stethoscope that that our team worked on engineering and basically it consists of three main parts. The first one is this -3D printed parts - these come off of a 3D printer like you see behind me and basically what that does is deposit layers of plastic one by one until it comes up with an intricate shape. These are from a kind of plastic that can be easily recycled and is available anywhere - it's the same kind of plastic that you would use in Lego - so it really is everywhere. The other sort of part is tubes. These are- we picked these tubes because these tubes are available in coca-cola machines and we figured there's coca-cola everywhere so there will be this tube everywhere and indeed we have yet to run into a place that doesn't have this tube and then the last part - the diaphragm - comes from doutang covers so these are the same covers you would have used on your reports when you were in grade school and we just use a hole punch to- a craft punch to punch them. When we put all of these together, we end up with a stethoscope that looks very much like the traditional stethoscope and behaves very much like the traditional stethoscope. Our product from this research is not the stethoscope, it is how to make the stethoscope, and how to make sure that that stethoscope is the best quality imaginable. We used modern techniques to test this stethoscope against the acoustics of other stethoscopes and we're able to prove that it is just as good in terms of the acoustics, or at the very least not inferior. Our colleagues love it. They kind of divide in two main categories. In places like the Gaza Strip, this really changes practice fundamentally and so the feedback of course is different. In Canada doctors say 'this is really cool,' in the Gaza Strip people say, 'wow this is really essential’. Our senses are tuned to very different things. Whereas the visual system is very good at detecting the edges of objects and motion of objects across space and color versus dark, the auditory system is actually tuned to frequencies and the frequencies of the brain are the critical information we're trying to extract. This device is an EEG recorder that acquires the brain waves through some sensors that have to be coupled with this device and once the brain waves are being recorded, you can click this button here. That's the brain stethoscope button and as you do that, it will turn the brain waves into sound. It relies on the code and the algorithm that we have worked on and it enables someone who doesn't know how to read EEG tobe able to actually get meaningful diagnostic information at the bedside. When things are calm, the sound is actually just almost a background hum. When a seizure condition exists, there's no longer that calm background hum. It's very, very prominent, high-amplitude rhythmicity. You hear an intense sound and you hear a kind of almost screaming. I think the majority of people think all seizures are convulsive, but that's actually not the case, especially not the case in critically ill patients in the intensive care units. What we did in this study was to actually send the same EEG files to a neurologist and medical students and nurses. Neurologists were asked to review the EEGs exactly the same way as traditionally being done, namely by visual inspection and nurses and medical students were asked to review the EEGs by listening to the sound. The ability of an untrained medical student or a nurse to read an EEG is 50%. They're either going to say it is or it isn't there and it's chance. What we found was that when just listening to the sound of the EEG, medical students could pick up a seizure when there was one 97% of the time. So it was really effective for people who don't have as much EEG training to listen to the EEG and get the diagnostic information they need to make a real treatment decision.
0 Comments
|