STEM
In the African nation of Ghana, lower-respiratory illnesses, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and diarrheal diseases account for 28% of deaths. All of these conditions can require extended intravenous fluid line (IV) use. Currently, nurses in hospitals and clinics in Ghana frequently go from bed to bed and manually count and re-calculate IV drip rates. In highly-crowded facilities, this can become an overwhelming and error-prone process.Team Flow is developing an efficient, user-friendly, and cost-effective method to accurately monitor and control the release intravenous fluids into patients. Our design considerations are grounded in our collaboration with an experienced emergency nurse at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, consultation with the University of Michigan’s Center for Socially Engaged Design, and literature review. Our members have traveled abroad on M-HEAL’s Service and Needs Assessment trip to Guatemala and the University of Michigan’s Global Health Design Initiative trip to Ghana. These experiences granted insight on specific IV administration needs. We have used our findings to develop requirements, specifications, and an array of possible solutions for our IV drip monitoring and controlling solution and have narrowed our scope to several introductory solutions. We are currently working to produce low-fidelity prototypes of these solutions for preliminary testing.
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