These 5 DIY medical devices might surprise you

Big ideas in medical device development can come from regular people driven to solve vexing problems.

Here are a handful of folks from outside the medtech industry who decided to create devices to solve their own health troubles or those of others around the world. Read on to see what high school, college and medical school students, a boiler engineer and a nurse came up with.

Tracking blood sugar affordably

High school student Celestine Wenardy invented a noninvasive continuous glucometer that works without drawing blood and costs about $63, compared with more than $1,000 for invasive glucometers available in the market.

Her glucometer achieves a coefficient of determination of 0.843 using two sensors. One uses interferometry, which involves the relationship between the refractive indices of the skin (and thus the amount of light reflected toward a certain area) and glucose concentration. The second sensor uses thermal technology to sense the correlation between the heat capacity of skin and glucose concentration.

For her efforts to improve glucose monitoring in her native Indonesia, Wenardy won the Virgin Galactic Pioneer Award in the 13-15 age category of the 2019 Google Science Fair. She built the wristwatch-style glucometer at her school, British School Jakarta.

“In the future, I would like to extend the range of substances in the blood this device can measure and market it to the public,” Wenardy told Google.

Help for facing neurological disorders

Erin Smith was an 18-year-old high school student when she noticed that Parkinson’s disease patients in a video by the Michael J. Fox Foundation had a distant look on their faces when expressing emotion.

Smith talked to Parkinson’s doctors and found they had made similar observations. Her research into the medical literature revealed that the parts of the brain that change after the onset of Parkinson’s are also involved in forming facial expressions.

Smith developed an artificial intelligence-powered “selfie” technology called FacePrint to capture those expressions and help doctors diagnose and monitor the degenerative muscular disorder. FacePrint requires only a computer and a webcam and has an 88% accuracy rate, according to published reports.

Now 19, Smith has taken a leave from her studies at Stanford University to work on a clinical trial of FacePrint at the university. The trial was partially funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation and a $100,000 fellowship from the Thiel Foundation. The Lenexa, Kansas native has been featured in numerous publications, including a story this week in Forbes. She hopes to adapt FacePrint for other conditions, such as depression, PTSD and Alzheimer’s disease.

“I really want to optimize for my personal learning,” Smith told Forbes, “as well as for the best way I can help shape and build the future of neurological and mental healthcare.”

Sterile field in a backpack

After Dr. Debbie Lin Teodorescu treated some of the people injured in the Boston Marathon bombing, she thought about how the proximity to a sterile operating room within the “golden hour” between a traumatic injury and treatment for that injury can save lives and prevent infections. She also thought about how creating and maintaining a sterile OR in a field hospital and in some areas of developing countries can be nearly impossible.

Then a student at Harvard Medical School, Teodorescu came up with a solution. SurgiBox is an inflatable, portable sterile field that fits in a backpack. Designed to keep patients and providers safe from surgical site infections, SurgiBox creates a sterile field around the patient, with sleeve-like arm openings for surgical staff. She likens it to a clear bubble sealed against the patient’s skin.

Teodorescu is a practicing physician who also was trained as an engineer. She continues to serve as project lead for SurgiBox and president of its board of directors.

“By shifting our perspective, we can bring safe surgery within the golden hour anytime and anyplace that it’s needed,” Teodorescu said in a TEDMED 2018 Hive Talk video recently posted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s D-Lab.

He fixed his own heart

Tal Golesworthy has Marfan syndrome, a condition that affects the body’s connective tissue, including tissue in the heart.

Like other Marfan sufferers, Golesworthy had an enlarged and weakened aorta and was in danger of aortic dissection. He feared having surgery to insert a composite aortic root graft, but what he feared more was the accompanying need to take anticoagulant drugs for the rest of his life.

A boiler engineer based in the U.K., Golesworthy knows a thing or two about plumbing. He worked with physicians and ultimately developed a bespoke porous textile mesh that takes the shape of a model based on the patient’s aorta so it perfectly fits around the outside of that aorta. This personalized external aortic root support is known as ExoVasc and Golesworthy was the first patient implanted with it. Because the device is external, the aorta need not be cut, and should not expand further, according to Golesworthy. Its implantation takes about two hours compared with up to six hours for a composite aortic root graft that retains the patient’s valves.

The more complicated surgery also requires the patient to go on a heart-lung bypass machine and to undergo total body cooling.

We work on the beating heart,” Golesworthy said during a TED talk that has had more than 1.4 million views. “No breaking into the circulatory system…  My aorta is fixed. I’m not going to worry about it, which is a rebirth for me.”

Preventing worsening wounds on the cheap

Meredith Bassler was a family nurse practitioner student in a San Francisco outpatient podiatry clinic. Many of her patients had diabetic neuropathy and foot wounds that had become too large for them to care for at home.

The clinic couldn’t provide the right types of padding for every patient’s shoes to relieve the pressure and prevent their wounds from getting larger, so Bassler decided to make padding for their feet and to teach them how to do the same. If it worked, the patients might not develop non-healing foot ulcers that could lead to amputation.

She went to a drug store and bought up all of its self-adhesive corn and callus pads. After practicing at home, Bassler brought the pads to the clinic and cut them to make custom shapes that fit around the borders of each patient’s wound. She taught the patients to do the same and wrote in a blog post on makernurse.com that they were thrilled to have a low-cost, DIY solution to a potentially dangerous problem.

These 5 DIY medical devices might surprise you