Toilet Plunger Becomes Portable Wound-Healing Device

In February a wound-care team from Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston traveled to Haiti, to help care for patients suffering from the large open wounds that accompany amputations, crushed limbs, and other injuries.

Among the team was MIT graduate student Danielle Zurovcik, who arrived ready to test a device which uses negative pressure to pull bacteria and fluid out of wounds, and was the crowning achievement for her master’s degree thesis project.

“I was walking through Kmart and saw a row of plungers,” she told AOL News. “I just thought, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what I can use.”
A month after her revelation, Zurovcik designed and built a simple device that uses a bellows pump, a plastic tubing and a fitting to enclose a wound. The creation is more or less a watered down version of a commercial negative-pressure pump, which is already a staple in American hospitals to treat bed sores and quicken burn relief.

Even the most portable of these pumps traditionally costs $100 a day to rent, and weighs 10 pounds with batteries. The pump Zurovcik invented costs $3 total, weighs less than half a pound, uses only 14 microwatts of power, and can be charged with a hand pump.

Zurovcik’s device is everything anyone could ask for – cost-effective, lightweight and minimal energy is needed to operate it. Users press the hand pump and that’s about all she wrote. That’s all it takes to initiate the negative pressure, which then pulls impurities out of the wound and sends blood to the damaged area.

“To basically take a toilet plunger and produce negative pressure over a prolonged period of time, that is really great,” Kristian Olson, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, told MIT’s Technology Review. “Not only do I see it answering this need in developing countries, I think it could really enhance home therapy for chronic wounds in the U.S.”

Read article used as source of this posting:
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/24837/?ref=rss&a=f

What can you do with this information:

• Share this information with the health care professionals you know.
• Send Danielle a note congratulating her on her accomplishments, it is amazing how a word of encouragement can spur you on. 
  DRZ [at] MIT [dot] EDU
• The next time someone tells you we can't afford good health care, remember this article and encourage others to look for low cost alternatives to expensive medical equipment.
• Encourage your children to build unlikely devices, using unexpected materials. I know I will never look at a toilet plunger the same way again.
• Share this blog with friends and associates, comment on this posting, chuckle about it all day long.