PRIME team tops at IShow

Hand-muscle measurement device wins prestigious competition

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

With a major victory in hand, a team of recent Rice graduates is now primed for greater things.

For a senior design project, the PRIME team of bioengineering students invented a device to measure intrinsic hand muscle strength. For their efforts, they won first place in the prestigious IShow competition, an innovation showcase for graduate and undergraduate students sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at its annual meeting in Palm Desert, Calif., June 14.

PRIME stands for Peg Restrained Intrinsic Muscle Evaluator, the device invented by team members Jennifer Cieluch, Caterina Kaffes, Matthew Miller, Neel Shah and Shuai “Steve” Xu. Read about how it works here.

The team’s patent-pending device beat competitors from the University of Houston, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Brown University. Their inventions ranged from efficient label printers to heart monitors to tools that would prevent blood clots or make incisions for laparoscopic surgery.

“We were shocked but we were very happy,” said Xu, talking while driving back to Houston a day after the competition. “A couple of the judges told us afterward that we had a very compelling message and that our technology was ingenious and innovative. They said we were the clear winners.”

The competition was stiff, said Maria Oden, professor in the practice of bioengineering and director of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, where the students created the device. “Many of the competing teams have already started businesses, and many of the team members were graduate students, MBA students or beyond. But our team did a super job throughout the design process and truly deserves this award.”

Gloria Gogola, an orthopedic surgeon at Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston, said PRIME has found a home in her clinic. Gogola had asked Rice to develop such a device last year. “We’ve been using it in the clinic on patients, and it’s working very nicely. We’ve got a study in progress now for clinical validation of the device, and that will be submitted for publication this fall.”

Gogola was thrilled to hear of the team’s IShow victory. “It’s very well-deserved. This particular student group worked extremely hard on the project, and they went above and beyond the course requirements. They took this from a concept to an actual working, clinically useful device.

“I expected they’d have some ideas and a starting point, but I was very pleased they took it all the way through the different versions and development stages to a working device.”

The PRIME team expected to plow the $10,000 prize back into the project, though Xu, riding with his teammates and feeling lucky, was momentarily game for other pursuits. “Well, Vegas is pretty close,” he said.

The team will compete in the student design competition at the annual conference of the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America in New Orleans June 23-27.