First Post.

or how my senior design project was born

This post is rather late but I figured I should start it at some point. From here on, I will attempt to document the progress of my senior design project and the adventures of PulseTEAM.

First a little project explanation (or at least my understanding of it). Our goal is to design and implement a medical device to measure arterial stiffness, which is correlated with risk of heart conditions. By measuring a patient’s ECG, carotid pulse, and femoral pulse, a measure called Pulse Waveform Velocity (PWV) can be calculated. This is a well-supported proxy for measuring a patient’s likelihood of heart failure with almost five decades of research. As a noninvasive procedure for preemptively diagnosing potential heart failure, PWV has incredible potential for heart failure prevention. Nevertheless, due to the cost and difficulty of use of PWV measurement technologies, PWV as a diagnosis tool is still not used in clinical settings.

Currently, the main device for PWV measurements is the Atcor Sphygmocor. However, several factors relegate to its use in research-only settings. Besides costing over $20,000, the device is incredibly difficult to use. The Sphygmocor uses a pressure sensor at the end of a pen for arterial pressure readings. While using the sensor, the only feedback is a live graph on the laptop screen; due to the lack of any sort of tactile feedback from the sensor, finding a strong pulse on a patient can be incredibly frustrating. Using the device to obtain the two pulse measurements required for PWV can take over 30 minutes. Adding in a poor UI/UX, these factors have contributed to this device being largely ignored in clinical settings.

Arriving at this understanding as a group was not exactly straight forward. Originally, our idea began as a device to diagnose heart conditions based on cardiovascular sound recordings. After several consultations with our advisors however, our previous idea was deemed rather useless and we were directed to learn more about PWV. Having understood these issues after meetings with several additional advisors (after a couple frustrating weeks), we finally agreed upon a feasible project idea: to create a cost-effective and user-friendly PWV measurement device that can be used in primary care settings.