Team Flow

Abstract

In the African nation of Ghana, lower-respiratory illnesses, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and diarrheal diseases account for 28% of deaths. All of these conditions can require extended intravenous fluid line (IV) use. Currently, nurses in hospitals and clinics in Ghana frequently go from bed to bed and manually count and re-calculate IV drip rates. In highly-crowded facilities, this can become an overwhelming and error-prone process.

Team Flow is developing an efficient, user-friendly, and cost-effective method to accurately monitor and control the release intravenous fluids into patients. Our design considerations are grounded in our collaboration with an experienced emergency nurse at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, consultation with the University of Michigan’s Center for Socially Engaged Design, and literature review. Our members have traveled abroad on M-HEAL’s Service and Needs Assessment trip to Guatemala and the University of Michigan’s Global Health Design Initiative trip to Ghana. These experiences granted insight on specific IV administration needs. We have used our findings to develop requirements, specifications, and an array of possible solutions for our IV drip monitoring solution and have narrowed our focus to one design. We are currently working to prototype this design for preliminary testing.

Mission

To develop an efficient, user-friendly, and cost-effective method to accurately monitor and control the release intravenous fluids into patients at hospitals and clinics in Ghana.

Project History and Current Work

Team Flow began in Fall 2017 as a group in the M-HEAL Incubator, using a need observed during the 2016 Global Health Design Initiatives trip to Ghana. Upon completion of the program, Team Flow continued as an exploratory project team in Fall 2018 and became a full project team before Fall 2019.

We are currently in the prototyping phase of our project. After preliminary testing, we have decided upon a light-based sensor to detect IV drip rates, and we are currently developing an Arduino-based circuit to monitor drip rates.