Project Goal and Background

Our objective is to alleviate the physical strain and pressures of proning ventilated patients on health care professionals, especially in a COVID-19 context, by reducing exposure to the patient and maximizing their time to perform high-acuity tasks.

 

We are a group of 6 MIT students who came up with a device designed to help nurses and health care providers prone patients easily and quickly. Our solution is a system of inflatable wedges that can be placed underneath the patient in their bed. When a patient needs to be prone-positioned, nurses can inflate the wedges to lift the patient into an angle that will make it easy for nurses to flip the patient onto their stomach or back.

 

 

We hope this open-source design can reach as many people as possible, improving the quality of care for patients with severe respiratory illnesses as well as alleviate the inefficiencies of the manual proning process that currently requires the careful coordination of multiple health care professionals. 

 

The objective of this website is to document our work and share our knowledge with as large of an audience as possible, in hopes of inspiring others to innovate and use our design. 

Background and Need

Clinical need

A common c​ondition for severely affected COVID-19 patients is Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), which causes lung inflammation and oxygen deprivation. To treat this, HealthCare Personnel (HCPs) perform prone ventilation, an essential process that maintains ARDS patients’ lung health while on a mechanical ventilator. This process usually requires 3-5 fully-protected HCPs. One is an anaesthesiologist or respiratory therapist positioned at the patient’s head, ensuring ventilation tubes are intact and the other HCPs are nurses who flip them from supine (stomach-up) to prone (stomach-down). The process can be viewed here. The average frequency of proning ranges from every 12 to 18 hours, making it a very frequent part of an HCP’s job. In the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic, our team believes that simplifying the proning process will help with PPE shortages and the stresses on HCPs.

To boost and reposition patients there are products like the HoverMatt, HoverTech Q2Roller, Prevalon Turn & Position system, and TOMI turn. These systems aid in rotating the patient, but would require multiple HCPs to flip the patient. There are only a few on-market solutions for prone-positioning: the Rotoprone hospital bed (Figure 1) and Guldman Repositioning Sling (Figure 2). However, both are expensive and a scarce resource in hospitals. The PronePad could fill the market gap for an affordable and easily deployable proning device.

Figure 1: Rotoprone bed

Figure 2: Guldman R

About us

We are a team of 6 MIT undergraduate students with backgrounds in mechanical engineering, computer science and economics who participated in the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Design Challenge Hackathon. From this event, we invented PronePad and decided to move forward with it as an open-source design. 

 

Open Source Design  

We will be releasing the following about our design:

• Form & Materials:
  • Optimal wedge angles for proning the patient
  • Attachment to hospital bed
  • Recommendation for wedge material
• Pneumatics
  • Pump specifications
  • Tubing and Valve system diagrams
  • Placement of intake valves
• Controls and Workflow
  • Workflow diagram
  • How the system should be controlled (form factor and interface of controller)
  • Ergonomics and Usability considerations
• Prototyping and Testing
  • Results from prototyping and experiments to validate the system's effectiveness

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