Design Project

My design project team; Connie Ho, Julie Xu, and I, have started a new group blog. This can be found at hipposarethebestengineers.blogspot.com.

Research Project Ideas

I found, on the nasa.gov website, an article describing a tissue engineering experiment conducted onboard the International Space Station. (1.)

The experiment centered around the problems in growing human cells outside the structure of the human body. The article mentioned that cells in the body grow within a scaffold of protein and carbohydrate fibers. In the absence of this structure (a petri dish in an experiment), human cells often grow in sheets, which causes tissues to have different properties than the same tissues in the human body. Growing cells in microgravity (space), however, allows cells to form structures that more closely resemble the structures they form in the human body. (1.)

For my research project, I’m interested in researching a couple things:

-The practicality and applications of growing human cells outside of the body (growing living replacement skin, liver cells, kidney cells).

-How can space exploration further bioengineering and medical research, and how bioengineering can be applied to space exploration.

1. Cellular Biotechnology Operations Support Systems: Human Renal Cortical Cell Differentiation and Hormone Production (CBOSS-01-02-Renal). Timothy Hammond. 3/13/2009

Seeing Structure: Hill College House

I analyzed the Hill College House across three length scales. My goals were to limit my observations to things I could observe directly, and to make my analysis interesting.

10^2 meters: The 10^2 meter scale encompasses the entire college house. I estimate Hill to be about 100 meters long, 30 meters wide, and 20 meters tall. Hill is a rectangle; with rooms all around the perimeter and a large open space in the middle. There are two entrances on one end of the building (one on top of the other), and a fence extends around the building. Hill is shaped very similarly to a shoebox.

Hill’s structure is simple and utilitarian. It’s function is to, basically, store people, and its rectangular shape allows many uniform rooms to exist within it. Additionally, it’s rectangular shape and lack of height (it’s much longer than it is tall) gives it stability. The fence, and only one entrance/exit, improves security by making it harder to get into.

1 meter: The 1 meter scale is about the width of the corridors in Hill, and the rooms are about 2 meters by 3 meters, and 2 meters tall. The rooms are arranged on the perimeter of the building, so all the rooms have a window. I can compare this to a honeycomb; Hill makes use of all its surface area (except the roof) by having rooms that repeat without wasted space (due to their rectangular structure), just like the hexagonal honeycomb cells repeat without any wasted space.

The middle of Hill is composed of a dining hall and a large open space, 4 stories tall. This open space is aesthetic, and necessary for every room to have an outside window. I estimate that there are 300 rooms in Hill.

10^-2 meter: At this length scale, I wanted to analyze a structure more interesting than the bricks of the building. I decided to analyze the structures enabling information and electrical energy to be distributed throughout Hill College House.

I can’t observe most of these structures, because they are within the walls. However, I can observe the endpoints of these structures. Electrical energy reaches each of the rooms in electrical sockets; pairs of holes in the wall about 2 mm by 30 mm wide, in which two pronged plugs are plugged. Information is transmitted in a similar way; plugs in the walls of each room have sockets for telephone lines and wired internet, which can be plugged into telephones and computers, which allow the information to be displayed as sound and pictures. Additionally, Hill has wireless internet; with my laptop computer, I can access the same internet that the internet socket has, without cords. Wireless internet is transmitted from wireless routers; boxes with antennas that are in some rooms. These routers are in turn connected to wired internet.

I can make some assumptions about the structure of the information and power distribution structures in Hill. Because there aren’t 1000 (my estimate of the number of electrical, internet, and telephone sockets in Hill) wires coming into Hill, I can assume that telephone lines, internet, and power lines enter Hill with a small number of wires, and then branch out into all of the rooms. This is similar to the nerve network of human body, which also transmits information.

This structure is suited to one of Hill’s functions; the taking in information, synthesizing it, and then transmitting it again. For example, in BE we research online, write blogs, and then post them again online. This is enabled by the information network at Hill and the other college houses.

Electronic Medical Records

Efficiency. If technology can make health care records more efficient, through an integrated system of electronic health care records, an immense amount of time currently wasted due to incompatibility between systems can be saved.

Less than 10% of health care providers use electronic records, and there are hundreds of programs currently marketed (1). The problem is, many of these programs do not share records between each other, so individual health care providers often have to resort to recopying and scanning records.

To reduce health care costs, it’s crucial that computers are used to do the tasks that they do much much better than humans; which includes storing data and making it quickly retrievable and transmittable. Humans manually copying and filing records is not efficient, and raises costs.

The US government is taking steps to increase efficiency in medical records. 17 billion dollars in stimulus money is being allocated toward electronic health records, and the ability to transmit and share records is required. Additionally, Congress may start cutting the Medicare and Medicaid payments to health institutions who haven’t instituted interoperable electronic health care records (records that can be transmitted and shared) by 2014 (1).

Hopefully, software will soon be available to allow the different electronic health care record programs used by medical practices to share patient records, reducing errors and administrative costs.

1. Work Begins on National E-Health Record Network. By David Twiddy, Associated Press. 9/31/2009

Technology with the Potential to Lower Health Care Costs:

Preventative medicine and psychological wellness can be improved by internet based, personal feedback programs without a health professional, according a review article in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (1). Such programs often use technology that allows alcoholics to record the amount of alcohol they consume, which is often greater than they think, and compare it to the amount the average person drinks. This single-session, personal feedback session, low-cost because of the lack of a professional in most cases, was found to be effective, according to the review article, which reviewed publications of 14 studies. If these programs can get alcoholics to recognize they have a problem and seek further help, drunk driving, domestic violence, liver disease, and many other personal and public health issues can be averted.

Trusted.MD, a medical blog (2), discusses the possibility of microcomputers and biosensors that monitor vital signs to determine how patients are reacting to medication, and predict acute symptoms before they occur, reducing the need for 911 calls and emergency hospital visits. These mobile sensors and processors could use existing cellphone networks to interface with doctors.

Technology can do specific medical tasks better than health professionals, at a drastically reduced cost. Physiological data monitoring technology can monitor patients around the clock, and can warn them about changing or abnormal findings. Internet based, personal feedback programs might be more likely to be used by alcoholics than full scale sessions with health professionals and rehabilitation programs.

Sources:

1. Curbing Problem Drinking with Personalized-Feedback Interventions: A Meta-Analysis. Heleen Riper, PhD, MSc, Annemieke van Straten, PhD, Max Keuken, BSc, Filip Smit, PhD, Gerard Schippers, PhD, Pim Cuijpers, PhD. 2009 Mar;36(3):247-55. American Journal of Preventative Medicine

2. “Will Medical Technology Reduce Healthcare Costs?” Adrienne Carlson, Trusted.MD Network, http://trusted.md/feed/items/mdjosephkim/2009/08/08/will_medical_technology_reduce_healthcare_costs. Note; this is a medical blog site, not a scientific journal.

What I've Realized Since Starting BE 100

Being innovative and influential requires more than great ideas. It requires the sharing of your ideas with others. It requires the meticulous documentation of your decision-making process and rigorous testing and citation of your sources.

So far in my life, I haven't worried about checking my work and documenting my decision making progress. For example, when I do math and physics problems, my work is often disorganized and incomprehensible to anyone but myself. As an engineer, especially when I'm doing real life work, I'll have to document my work clearly so others can understand it and learn from it.

Potential Biotechnology to Manage the H1N1 Pandemic

Doctor’s appointments and Student Health services appointments take time and are inconvenient. However they are the primary method through which contagious diseases are diagnosed, and contagious patients are treated and instructed to remain at home to limit passing on their disease. If technological methods for providing preliminary diagnoses of patients more conveniently and expediently than doctor's visits, patients could be alerted to go to a doctor and stay home from work, when the would not otherwise have done so. This would reduce the spread of the swine flu pandemic.

Technologies such as this already exist; the photo below looks like its from a science fiction movie, but it’s really a Chinese health official using a infrared thermometer to screen airline passengers for fever to prevent the spread of swine flu. However, I believe biotechnology has much more potential for the noninvasive monitoring of physiological data and diagnosis of disease than infrared thermometers.

Source: Montreal Student Returns to Morocco with A(H1N1) Swine Flu, montrealgazette.com, June 12, 2009

I wrote previously (blog entry “Bioengineering?”) about pulse oximeters that can measure physiological date non-invasively using beams of light. I believe this technology has the potential to non-invasively and expediently screen patients for many different physiological signs indicating many different diseases.

In the future, health screening machines located in the college houses at Penn could measure physiological data from students to help them decide whether their symptoms warrant a visit to the doctor or not.