Critical Procedures Made Easier with Intubation Upgrade

Engineering students at Rice University are working to make intubation more intuitive and air more accessible to patients with a wireless video laryngoscope.

“I wasn't really aware of the impact this could have in the context of COVID-19,” said RU senior, Victoria Kong  . “But as we got into it, I realized this is an important tool to help airway managers minimize contact with potentially contagious aerosolized particles. And the wireless video capability of our device further creates distance for the safety of the health care provider.”

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] i'm a part of team gateway to area a team of senior bioengineers from rice university i'm tasked with creating a novel new video larger scope that will aid towards the easier more intuitive and quicker intubation process of intermediate patients components of an endotracheal intubation

00:00:19 there's upper airway anatomy basically there's two major tubes uh we can simplify it to that the esophagus and the trachea trachea in this position is above the esophagus what we need to do is we need to put this tube into the trachea and not into the esophagus that way we're getting air to the patient's lungs so in order to do that we have

00:00:41 a laryngoscope and we have an endotracheal tube which i'll open now so kind of the first step we have our monitor here is to position the patient's head and then insert the learning scope and then it is as simple as getting this

00:01:03 insertion in laryngoscopys are the third most common procedure performed in u.s hospitals they're performed millions of times every single year and yet to this day 18 of all endotracheal intubations with laryngoscopies are considered difficult when this procedure is considered difficult the patient is at risk due to not having access to air and so that

00:01:27 comes with risk of stroke and potentially death with hypoxia and to be honest this technology has not been innovated much since it was first first invented in 80 years ago so learn learn just largely look like this in this context then given how prevalent that this procedure is performed we really believe that there's a huge

00:01:49 need for innovation in this sphere the mission is to do something that works for a wider variety of patients different physiologies it's accessible it is more functional and it actually applies to a wider patient population this project really has a broader scope past even the current covert pandemic we're in this is a tool that's used in

00:02:15 so many procedures on a daily basis and not only um just like hospital scenarios but also emergent situations too and so this is going to have such a broader reach than what we're even doing now today and so i think that's really um exciting and um really invigorating as well as we push towards the end point of this and sort of gather information to pass on to the

00:02:37 next people that work on and carry the baby of this project [Music]