Seat belts and hockey gloves among innovations for Canada's first university biomedical design program
Credit to Author: Susan Lazaruk| Date: Sat, 16 Nov 2019 01:29:57 +0000
When the dean of UBC’s medical faculty, Dermot Kelleher, graduated from medical school 40 years ago, removing a kidney stone required open surgery that put a patient at a 20 per cent risk of infection and a significant hospital stay.
“The world has irrevocably changed,” Kelleher said at an event at Vancouver General Hospital on Friday to launch a partnership of the Praxis Spinal Cord Institute, a non-profit with the goal of developing and marketing biomedical products, and UBC’s school of biomedical engineering.
Now, patients needing a kidney stone removed get imaging of the condition, such as MRI, and a minimally invasive procedure, as opposed to open surgery, both thanks to biomedical engineering.
“Because of the impacts of biomedical engineering, it is really worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize,” said Kelleher, at the event, which marks the beginning of an expansion of Canada’s first biomedical design program.
The partnership expands the engineering school’s Engineers in Scrubs, its flagship program in biomedical design that started last year.
Dr. Dermot Kelleher, dean of the faculty of medicine at UBC, announces a partnership with Praxis Spinal Cord Institute to expand Canada’s first biomedical design program.
Engineers in Scrubs is an “extraordinary development” because it brings engineers and physicians together to discuss “concepts that will change the world,” said Kelleher. “We are going to see really exciting things from this institute and this university over the coming year,” he predicted.
On display at the launch was a prototype of a glove designed to help Paralympian athletes who have trouble with their grip.
The sports “grip assist” allows tennis or hockey players to hang on to their equipment with a glove outfitted with a Velcro wraparound that allows them to hang on to a tennis racquet, for instance, said Engineers in Scrubs student Carly Jones.
This is designed to replace what some athletes use now: An entire roll of hockey tape at a go that is time-consuming to apply, not adjustable and costly for regular players at a price tag of $2,000 a year in tape, she said.
Jones said the expansion of Engineers in Scrubs will help engineers connect with consumers to help develop products and investors for commercially viable ideas.
Another example, developed by student Alaa Heshmati and her team, is the Accessibelt. It’s a portable attachment for seat belts for those with dexterity challenges. She said the goal is to get the device to market to as many people who may need it, but that is months away.
The federal government has invested more than $10 billion yearly in science and research since 2016 and “despite a thriving biomedical industry, many innovative biomedical products do not make it due to lack of funding and regulatory restrictions,” UBC and Praxis said in a joint news release.
One such product, to assist those with dexterity issues to be able to operate clothing closures, had a promising commercial application but lost the race to market to a competitor, said Penny Clarke-Richardson of Praxis.
Arbutus Medical, a company based at VHG that develops surgical devices, came out of Scrubs and is one of the success stories, said Scrubs director Dr. Roger Tam.