Johns Hopkins team wins global health design competition

Top honors for low-cost, pulmonary diagnostic system for rural India

SpiroSense, a seven-member team from Johns Hopkins University, took top honors in the 2015 National Undergraduate Global Health Technology Design Competition held at Rice University March 27. The team captured first place in the annual competition with a complete diagnostic system for obstructive lung disease.

SpiroSense of Johns Hopkins University won the 2015 Undergraduate Global Health Technologies Design Competition. Team members, from left, are Angelo Cruz, Rohith Bhethanabotla, Rohit Joshi, Rachel Yung, Manyu Sharma and Rodolfo Finocchi.

The competition, which is in its fifth year, is sponsored by Rice 360° Institute for Global Health Technologies with support from the Lemelson Foundation. It features teams of students who present technologies they have designed to address specific health needs in low-resource settings.

SpiroSense’s easy-to-use, low-cost spirometer combined signal detection and processing with a simple mechanism to direct the flow of air from a patient exhaling into the device. By integrating the use of the device into existing kiosk systems, the team aims to provide much-needed diagnostic testing in rural communities in India.

Second prize went to Team SteriVac of Rice University for DoubleJect, a single-dose, prefilled device that streamlines vaccine reconstitution and administration into a simple, low-cost process. DoubleJect has the potential to significantly increase vaccination rates by reducing waste of excess unused reconstituted vaccine doses.

Postpartum Hemorrhage Treatment from the University of Michigan took third prize with its device to treat primary postpartum hemorrhage in the developing world. The device, which has the potential to save the lives of millions of mothers worldwide, exerts both internal and external pressure in the uterus to prevent maternal hemorrhages that result from failure of the uterus to contract after birth.

“We’re excited about the expanded participation of teams from Africa,” said competition organizer Veronica Leautaud, director of education for Rice 360°. “Following its third-place finish in 2014, Jimma University in Ethiopia returned this year with a new team, and we also welcomed two teams from the University of Malawi Polytechnic in Blantyre, Malawi, which just launched a new degree program in biomedical engineering.”

Leautaud said 35 teams applied to participate in the 2015 competition. The 23 finalist teams that competed Friday represented 16 universities in the U.S. and Africa. Teams were judged on how clearly they articulated the global health needs that their technology would address. They were also scored on the technical and social feasibility of their proposed solutions, as well as on the team’s plans for overcoming technical and social hurdles to adoption. Each team was given six minutes to present its design.

“This year’s judging was another highlight,” Leautaud said. “We’ve always drawn judges from outside of Rice, but we were fortunate this year to have both the largest and the most varied group yet. We had representatives from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Lemelson Foundation and a number of biomedical companies and nonprofits working alongside global health clinicians, venture capitalists and researchers from the Texas Medical Center, the University of Houston, Texas State University, the University of Texas School of Public Health in Brownsville and NASA.”

The people’s choice award went to Ending Enteric Disease of the University of Maryland-College Park for its proposal to engineer oral rehydration solutions using locally available ingredients in low-resource settings. Oral rehydration therapy can prevent dehydration due to diarrheal diseases, a leading cause of mortality in the developing world.

The award for best poster went to Team TocoTrack of Johns Hopkins University for its automated device to monitor uterine contractions during labor to allow for the timely detection and clinical treatment of obstructed labor.