From Oct. 24 to 26, the Hopkins Center for Biomedical Innovation and Design (CBID) and Jhpiego, a non-profit organization associated with Hopkins that works to bring healthcare to poorer areas of the world, hosted the first Emergency Ebola Design Challenge at Hopkins. The Design Challenge was focused on creating better personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers fighting Ebola in West Africa.
The event was one borne out of necessity due to recent news of the spread of Ebola across Africa and into the United States. A sense of urgency to create equipment which could be used in the near future colored the tone of the events of the weekend.
“There was a very well-defined timeline of what we needed to get accomplished,” Mihika Reddy, a graduate student in the CBID master’s program at Hopkins, said. The weekend was filled with informational sessions, brainstorming and prototyping, all events conducive to creating practical innovations in the shortest amount of time.
On the first day of the Design Challenge, participants listened to presentations from nurses from the Hopkins Department of Epidemiology and Infection Control. Experts from Jhpiego also spoke about the current state of equipment in the field.
“By interviewing [experts] and watching them don and doff the PPE, we were able to construct a list of challenges that were meaningful to tackle,” David Blumenstyk, a master’s student in the CBID program, said.
The purpose of this day was to have a firm grasp of the technology and problems that medical workers in the field faced.
The next day, participants delved into the design portion of the challenge head first. Participants broke into teams and wrote down all the problems they saw with current equipment.
Melody Tan, another CBID master’s student, said that this first part involved a lot of time spent brainstoming and then discussing which of their ideas would actually work. The needs statements the participants wrote included those such as “there is a need to visualize where PPE is contaminated” and “there is a need to facilitate the doffing process without needing another person’s assistance.”
The teams then began to brainstorm individual PPE design ideas. Tan and Reddy’s teams were primarily focused on removal of PPE. Reddy’s major concerns were to minimize the amount of touching of the most highly contaminated areas and how to dispose of PPE to minimize contamination. They eventually created what Reddy described as a very rough prototype.
“[The solutions we came up with were] rapidly implementable, cost-effective, and compatible with available resources,” Reddy said. Tan noted that the proposed solutions had to be able to be manufactured within the next couple of months in preparation for deployment.
Blumenskyk’s group was focused on controlling temperature and humidity within the suit. His group’s design involved creating a suit that would optimize air flow and cooling, which he said would balance air permeability with infection prevention.
On Sunday, after viewing many prototypes built with materials such as plastic sheeting, fabric, and sewing machines, a panel of judges chose four concepts to carry forward with. Less than a month later, Reddy and Tan’s groups are now organizing follow-up sessions for participants interested in continuing to develop their design, prototyping, and applying for USAID grants. Blumenstyk’s group, which has 15 members and $5000 in funding, is currently in the process of testing ideas.
“[We want] to identify which proposed design offers the greatest impact on cooling at the lowest cost,” Blumenstyk said.
The ultimate goal of the Design Challenge is to eventually develop a design for personal protective equipment that a commercial company can manufacture, sell and distribute. If the ideas that the participants in the Design Challenge came up with and their drive to innovate and succeed are any indicator, they already seem to be well on their way there.
