Project 3 Process- Medical Products: Internal Diabetes Monitoring System
As our first exercise preparing for Project 3, we brainstormed as groups interested in the different categories of the Create the Future contest. You can see the categories for this contest on the right side of the home page here. Right away I was interested in Medical Supplies because I am actively pursuing majoring in nursing. A few other students and myself brainstormed several areas in which we thought we could aim to improve or increase the quality of technology, medical benefits, and convenience for the greater population, etc.
Here are just a few examples of ideas that we came up with:
hospital waiting rooms
casts
internal monitoring systems
NICUs (Neonatal intensive care unit)
pre-natal and post-natal care
sterilizing supplies
Diabetes monitoring devices
After the exercise was completed, we had about 65 ideas. We eliminated several options in order to find a project that our group members would be interesting in working with, and finally, we decided to collaborate on internal diabetes monitoring systems.
Our guiding research question was: How can we improve internal monitoring of blood glucose levels in patients with Type 2 diabetes?
Initially, our idea was to create an internal monitoring devices for blood glucose levels in patients with type 2 diabetes. We thought that the device would be placed in the arm near the bicep, which is an area that is easy to access and would not require surgery to insert or remove.
For a precedent study, we evaluated similar methods of monitoring systems for diabetes, and found that our idea had already been conceptualized in just the past year. Here is a link to the Google page which lists results for the preceding devices that we found. It was helpful for us to know the ways in which this kind of device had been designed in the past so that we could aim to design a better model. Many of the former models required an external component to be fully functional (including the ability to communicate with your Smart Phone.)
We wanted to avoid any need for needle pricks and any external components to our device. Therefore, our ideal product is something that will be exclusively internal and yet still able to communicate with your Smart Phone so that a patient may constantly access their important electronic information. This would also help in treatment situations so that the doctor may have easy access to their patients’ records.
Further identifiers and descriptors of our product include: a device in your arm (near the bicep), connected to an application on your phone which interprets your statistics for the contents of your blood and including the levels of insulin, cholesterol, and glucose. One benefit of this product would be alerting a patient as to when their levels are unstable or too high.
Here are two images that we designed for the visual prototype of our device and the Smart Phone application:
We considered that one con of our product might be possible ethical concerns, seeing as it would require patients to insert a chip into their arm. However, as an additional research step, one of our team members also surveyed 9 people who have Type-2 Diabetes and found that they all said they would be interested this product and that they would pay up to $500 out of pocket for the service our product would provide.
From the research we collected, we learned that • “29.1 million people in the United States have diabetes” • High death rates have rose to an estimated 3.4 million deaths in the world from high blood sugar levels in this disease • 50 percent of people with diabetes die of cardiovascular disease, primarily heart disease and stroke. (Source)
With our internal monitoring device for diabetes patients, we are confident that this device will help people regulate their diabetes and hopefully significantly lower the death rate in patients.