Industrial Capstone Senior Design Spring Showcase

Moderator: Erin Caples, Sr. Assistant to the Dean

Industry Partners: Avanos, Northeast Biomedical, Draper Labs

Team Mentors: Yanfen Li, Ph.D., Chiara Ghezzi, Ph.D., Jinxiang Xi, Ph.D., Tim Looney, Scott Stapleton, Ph.D.

Sponsor: University of Massachusetts Lowell

Project Description: The purpose of our device is to aid in the distribution of opioid medication when a user is sent home with their prescription for an acute injury or procedure. The current protocol for medical prescription allows patients to go home with up to a seven-day supply of opioids to self-administer, with a dose of one pill every four to six hours as needed. Patients often feel the need to take a higher dose than prescribed because their body becomes less responsive to the opioid with repeated use and they no longer experience as significant of relief as when they started. Due to the potency of these drugs, tolerance can commonly lead to dependence and addiction. This device will assist the patient in adhering with their prescription when receiving opioids as a treatment for pain management. 

Mentor: Yanfen Li, Biomedical Engineering 

Sponsor: University of Massachusetts Lowell

Project Description: Across the United States, the current backlog campaign of rape test kits remains unaddressed in part due to the current practices used for processing evidence. Our team aims to develop an affordable and efficient rape test kit that captures the needs of sexual assault survivors, medical personnel, and crime lab staff. Our solution is an immunoassay platform that uses specific antibodies to probe for common biologics found in newly collected and backlogged rape test kits. By color change, these biologics, such as saliva or semen, can be detected and identified within minutes, reducing the time spent processing rape test kits.

Mentor: Yanfen Li, Ph.D.

Sponsor: University of Massachusetts Lowell

Project Description: The project is a bioreactor capable of incubating gingival tissue for up to 7 days in vitro. Throughout this incubation, various methods for monitoring culture diagnostics and cell vitality parameters will be utilized to provide an accurate profile of gingival tissue development. This bioreactor will model the oral microbiome, providing identical chemical and biomechanical conditions to those found in the human body. 

Mentor: Chiara Ghezzi, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor: University of Massachusetts Lowell

Project Description: A prototype for a silk-based, bone replacement will be created. This bone construct will have mechanical properties and geometry similar to that of natural bone. It will have the biocompatibility to be able to survive in the human body, without being rejected from an immune response. Hydroxyapatite and collagen will be used to base our prototype around qualities close to those of natural bone. It will be strong enough to support body weight while having areas of varying porosity to promote vessel growth and integration into the body. This will provide orthopedic patients with a lightweight, osteoconductive alternative to popularly used metal devices. 

Mentor: Chiara Ghezzi, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor: University of Massachusetts Lowell

Project Description: Current inhalation drug delivery devices are limited in their ability to target therapeutic regions, which is a result of inadequate particle deposition and flow data. It is desired to design an improved model of the airway that can give more realistic data, allowing for improved targeting by inhalation devices. Our chosen solution is to build on prior work of Dr. Xi and use Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data to develop a 3D model of the airway but combined with artistic renderings to provide a more complete description of minute features. The model will be used in computational flow software for theoretical particle tracking and will be manufactured to test under realistic conditions.

Mentor: Jinxiang Xi, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor: Avanos Medical, Chronic-care; Ruoy Wang

Project Description: The team is tasked with optimizing size of the heat lesion geometry developed by the standard radiofrequency probe while simultaneously acting as a cheaper option to its water-cooled alternative. Increasing the heat lesion volume will allow a greater probability of deactivating the desired target pain nerves. This desired optimization will be achieved by focusing on the implementation of multiple tines at the cannula tip. By extending tines at the cannula’s tip, by heat transfer, the ideal configuration would create a lesion that extends primarily out past the probe, extending its range and capturing the surrounding nerves. A computational model will be developed by means of Solidworks and COMSOL to simulate variations of multi-tined probes under procedural conditions to finalize a design with a larger heat lesion size.

Mentor: Jinxiang Xi, Department of Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor: Northeast Biomedical

Project Description: Patients who receive nasogastric tubes have a considerable risk of injury due to a high rate of unsuccessful attempts by nurses and doctors when blindly guiding the tube through the esophagus and into the stomach for feeding and monitoring contents. It is desired to safely and effectively insert a nasogastric tube into a patient with minimal damage, while still being able to provide nutrients to the patients and measure the stomach’s volumetric contents. In this project, elements of this system will be designed and tested, to go along with Northeast Biomedicals previous work in this area. 

Mentor: Tim Looney, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsors: Northeast Biomedical & New Paradigm Concepts

Project Description: The team is working with Northeast Biomedical and New Paradigm Concepts to facilitate the design of a patented blood monitoring device, known as HemoGuide™. This device is intended to provide medical personnel with a minimally invasive means of taking rapid and accurate blood volume measurements. This is especially useful when treating trauma patients, where proper resuscitation parameters must be determined as quickly as possible.

Mentor: Tim Looney, Biomedical Engineering

Sponsor: The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory

Project Description: The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory (Draper) in Cambridge, MA is currently developing a Pediatric Heart Valve that can grow with an infant patient. In order to safely integrate this heart valve into the patient’s heart, the mechanical properties of the patient’s cardiac tissue in the area of implantation must be understood. Draper has tasked us with developing a method to characterize the mechanical properties of cardiac valve annulus tissue. Our objective is to design, build, and test a system capable of collecting the necessary data to create linear regression stress versus strain plots of ten different cardiac valve annuli tissue specimens, and calculate the mechanical properties, specifically the Young’s Modulus of Elasticity, of those specimens from those plots. The testing method and analysis of heart tissue is the focus of this project.

Mentors: Scott Stapleton, Mechanical Engineering, and Corin Williams, Draper Labs, Senior Member Technical Staff