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5/12/2009

Got to hand it to them
Rice students bring strength-measurement device to national stage

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Leaving college with an engineering degree is a wonderful thing.

Leaving college with a patent that will help ease pain, save time, trouble and money and earn royalties -- well, that's pretty good, too.

That's the position five newly graduated bioengineering students hope to find themselves in after spending the year brainstorming and then building the Peg Restrained Intrinsic Muscle Evaluator, or PRIME, in Rice's new Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen.

	JEFF FITLOW
	Members of team PRIME -- (from left) Jennifer Cieluch, Neel Shah, Matthew Miller, Steve Xu and Caterina Kaffes -- show the Peg Restrained Intrinsic Muscle Evaluator they'll take to IShow in California next month.

The PRIME team -- Jennifer Cieluch, Caterina Kaffes, Matthew Miller, Neel Shah and Shuai "Steve" Xu -- have already been rewarded for their efforts with several engineering honors at Rice, including first place at the Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Engineering Division and National Instrument’s Engineering Design Prize. But, they're about to chase a much bigger one -- the top prize at IShow, the innovation showcase sponsored by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Team PRIME will compete against six other finalists for honors in the June 14 competition at the ASME's annual meeting in Palm Desert, Calif.

The challenge presented to the team by Maria Oden, who teaches the senior bioengineering design course, was to come up with a device that accurately measures the strength of intrinsic hand muscles. These are the muscles from wrist to fingertip that allow humans to play a piano, grip a pencil or perform any task that requires dexterity and precision.

Gloria Gogola, an orthopedic surgeon at Shriners Hospital for Children in Houston, approached Rice with the problem. "She said, 'We don't have an easy way to measure the muscles that exist within our hands,'" Xu said. "Why is that important? Well, 20 percent of all emergency room admissions in the United States are hand-related.

Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen
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Discover how Rice is pushing the innovations of its students into the world "Neuromuscular disorders like spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig's disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis -- all those things affect the intrinsic muscles of the hand."

Anybody who's ever had a checkup knows how doctors routinely test strength -- hold up a hand, push this way, push that way. The assessment is just by feel, nothing quantifiable. Xu said there are devices to measure hand strength, but the basic hand-held grips with gauges that are currently available aren't nearly accurate enough to be truly useful and do not work for those with small hands or those with unusual morphologies.

PRIME aims to fill that gap. The Rice-born device, for which a provisional patent has been filed, has three elements: a pegboard base, a force transducer enclosure and a PDA (currently a Hewlett-Packard model), custom-programmed to capture measurements.

In a typical five-minute test, a patient puts a hand on the pegboard, and the doctor places pegs to immobilize all the fingers but one. "You wouldn't think it works as well as it does, but once you pin the hand in, you can't move anything but the finger we want you to," Miller said.

A loop between the force transducer is fitted around the finger, and when the patient moves it, the amount of force applied is measured. "So we isolate a finger, turn on the PDA, click sample, you push as hard as you can and stop. PRIME gets the peak force," Xu said. "Then the doctor can create a patient-specific file with all your information, time- and date-stamped, and record every single measurement in a HIPAA-compliant manner." Data can then be sent via Bluetooth from the PDA to a server, he said.

Miller said support from National Instruments (NI), a key sponsor of the design kitchen, was critical to the team's success. He said the company donated a compact flash device worth more than $600 that converts analog data to digital and works with the company's LabVIEW language, which the students used to program the PDA.

"I feel really fortunate to work with this team," Xu added. "I give credit to Dr. Oden for putting us together and giving us this project, because each of us has different strengths and really diverse interests that came into play here." Oden is the director of the design kitchen and a Rice professor in the practice of engineering.

"Neel and Caterina are really good at the groundbreaking engineering, the hard-core, hands-on things," Xu said. "Matt took the lead on sensor development, the load cell and development of the enclosure. I've always been a software guy. And Jenny's been huge in terms of project management, keeping the whole team on track.

"If we didn't have each of these pieces, I don't think we'd have come to this point."

"They're a really sharp team," said Eric Dean, an academic field engineer for NI, of the students' award-winning effort. "We were looking at teams that made innovative use of NI technologies in their projects, and there were six or seven at Rice that were terrific, but this was the best."

In its tests, the team has reported a data error rate of less than 10 percent, and members believe under 5 percent is achievable. "That's a magnitude less than what we're seeing in the literature," said Xu. "We need to do some more filtering, a few more engineering things, but it's wholly reasonable for us to get there."

With more hands-on experience, presentations and a forthcoming paper, the students expect PRIME to be ready for institutional review at Shriners Hospital by summer's end. "We're going to prove the device does what it's advertised to do and start building databases among pediatric patients," said Miller.

Xu, who will attend Harvard Medical School, sees great potential in the product. He hopes it will find a home in hospitals and rehabilitation clinics where it could be used to compare the effectiveness of surgical interventions or to diagnose neuromuscular degenerative diseases. "There's so much applicability, it's hard to pinpoint our market size," he said.

Rice's Office of Technology Transfer is helping the team with patent issues. "By the end of the summer, we'll hopefully have that full patent in place and a paper out," Miller said. "Then we'll see where the buzz takes us."