Herff College of Engineering

Herff engineers create medical device to help nursing student take final exam

Herff College of Engineering students don't just create things to help other engineers. When tasked with the challenge of helping a fellow University of Memphis student, a group of Herff engineers answered the call.

Herff engineers create device to help nursing student with mobility issue pass exam

The work happening at the Herff College of Engineering doesn't just benefit our students. When their professor reached out to them with a challenge, a group of Herff students answered the call by creating a medical device that allowed a University of Memphis nursing student with mobility issues to take his final exam.

All Johnny, a Loewenburg College of Nursing student pursuing a career in healthcare management, had to do to complete his degree was pass his NCLEX exam, the standardized exam required for nursing students. Johnny has limited mobility in his hands, which could make it difficult to perform certain tasks, such as opening packages, handling needles, and inserting an IV.

"He can't do a lot of things we think of as super trivial, such as opening a bag or inserting a syringe into a tube. So, we had to design these items with certain constraints in mind. Our goal here was to make him fully independent of another helper so that he could perform these tasks on his own," said Herff College of Engineering student Peter Lee.

Lee worked on the project alongside Herff students Gabriel Pike, Rafi Ur Rahman and Tri Truong. Together, the group created a cutting board that allowed Johnny to open a bag and a device to hold vials of medicine.

"We thought, 'Okay. Usually, there are tables. So, we can utilize those tables," Lee said of the device designed to hold vials. "We can implement a suction cup. You can just press it down on a table. It'll hold itself there, and (the device) is designed to hold medicine vials. The neck is special. It's designed to accommodate different sizes of medicine vials. Once it's locked in, you can interact with it in a fixed manner. It's not going to budge anywhere. From here, Johnny can do things like take a syringe with a needle and plunge it in, and he can also change the orientation to another one, allowing him to draw the syringe with the requirement of the vial being upside down."

Truong, whose work focused mainly on the cutting board, said he found inspiration from her very own kitchen.

"My first thought for it was to come up with some guillotined device or some very complicated mechanism for slicing, but this was inspired by the Saran Wrap slicer that you can just buy," Truong said. "My goal was to save work for me and keep the design very simple and for him very simple to use."

The group acknowledged the simplicity of their devices. The difficulty in the task, they said, lay in testing such devices without the full use of their fingers.

"When you think about it, the tasks are not that hard. But you need to maintain a clean environment, and you can't touch a lot of things. Also, you can't use a lot of things for medical reasons. So, we had to work with a lot of constraints. Even if it is a simple task, it is not," said Rahman. "At some point, I think we taped up some of our fingers."

Pike said that the project and their insight into Johnny's life revealed to the group many things that they had taken for granted as people without mobility issues.

"What we got from Johnny is that, in nursing and in healthcare, there is some sort of systemic ableism where it is very difficult for people who may have issues with their mobility to pass impractical exams," Pike said.