Affordable Timer for Tracking Dressing Changes

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Team Member(s) 
Jade Balansag
Amarachi Elekeokwuri
Kate McLean
Kate Olid
Alice Tchangoum 

Mentor(s) 
Aditya Loganathan
Dr. Meltzer

Instructor(s) 
Dr. HyungSok Choe, BME, GW Engineering

Wound care is a vital practice across many health care fields. Nurses, specifically bedside nurses in hospital emergency rooms are regularly required to care for wounds even though they may not have specialized in wound care. To complicate things, emergency rooms are often busy pulling healthcare professionals in many different directions at once.  Affordable Timer provides a way for nurses, patients, and other stakeholders to quickly identify if a patient's dressing has exceeded a preset amount of time and needs to be changed, leading to reduction of the risk of infection and promoting quality care measures.

Why is it important?

Affordable Timer creates a proactive device that helps nurses change dressings in a more timely manner to reduce the chance of sepsis in patients. With a variety of dressings that are used in the hospital as well as the busy nature of the workplace, it can be difficult to accurately track the time a dressing has been on a patient, a problem that can result in the increase of Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAIs) linked to improper wound/dressing care. 

What is the coolest thing about your project?

Our project combined a variety of electrical aspects. In the first semester, our design incorporated RFIDs.  It was cool to see the design come to life when testing and watching the transmission of data from the sensor to the app. The second semester, our project became more of an electrical device that incorporated a moisture sensor component.  Seeing the sensor respond based to the moisture levels was exciting.

What were some technical challenges?

A big challenge our group faced had to do with HIPAA compliance, learning how not to violate any privacy concerns in the process of implementing and testing our product, especially during the fall semester when we were dealing with patient information.