Focus on Collaboration

For some healthcare patients, finding a suitable vein for inserting a catheter can be complicated by age, skin color, obesity, or medical condition. 

Commercial vein finder devices are expensive, which restricts their use in nursing education. So as part of their sophomore biomedical engineering principles class, RMU biomedical engineering students worked with nursing students to design and build for them a functional and inexpensive device that uses near-infrared light to illuminate blood vessels.

The vein finder device is a key element of an upcoming RMU exhibit of healthcare data analytics simulation this year at “Liftoff PGH 2020,” a major conference on healthcare innovation hosted by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation. Mathematics and media arts students will also collaborate on the project to demonstrate how data science can aid healthcare and further coronavirus research. The display will demonstrate a potential blood scan process, yielding simulated patient data that moves through a computer cloud and is analyzed with the aid of machine learning and artificial intelligence, with results displayed using projection mapping technology.