Open Spirometry Network

Please join us this Friday, May 1 when the BME students will present their current spirometer design as part of the 2009 BME Design Expo. The spirometer team is scheduled for a 1:40pm presentation, but they will have a table set up from 12-2.
The event is held in the first floor atrium of the [...]

Last week we met with David Van Sickle and David Hubanks of ZMD America, Inc. – which has a Madison office – to discuss the possibility of utilizing one of ZMD’s signal conditioners in the spirometer circuitry. David H drew our attention to one in particular (the 31014), which costs only around $2.
There are numerous [...]

The BME team has won the Department of Biomedical Engineering Tong Research & Development Follow-on Award.
The prize provides for half-time summer employment for two students, and a budget for materials and services, so that they can further develop their design and advance it towards reaching patients through commercialization.
The Tong Biomedical Engineering Design Awards are [...]

Susan Lampert Smith wrote an article about the spirometry team that appeared on Wednesday in Wisconsin Week, a university publication. Thanks Susan!

Spirometry is effort dependent and skills such as understanding, attention, coordination, and cooperation with the person administering the test are required for accurate measurements. To help instruct and coach kids during spirometry, incentive screens have been designed to visually motivate their best effort and to encourage consistency from one measurement to the next. Often they [...]

The BME students have been working hard for a little more than one month now and are making good progress. Last week, they began testing various differential pressure sensors in simple systems like the one you see here.
They’ve started preparing for their upcoming mid-semester presentation on the project which will take place Friday afternoon. I hope [...]

 
One of the most fun and challenging parts of this project is trying to build creative solutions to problems that are inefficiently solved today by commercial markets – in other words, solutions rooted in a different ethic that presume an abundance of funds.
In the case of the spirometer, nowhere is this more apparent than with the [...]

A team of UW-Madison biomedical engineering students have decided to spend the semster working on the spirometry project for their applied design course.
The four undergraduate students began last week with a trip to the spirometry lab. The team is taking apart old spirometers and doing background research as they develop a preliminary specification.
This is my [...]

The measurement of lung function is essential to the diagnosis and management of respiratory disease, and to research into its origins and treatment. However, current spirometers are not affordable for the majority of health care providers in many low and lower middle income countries, and are not widely used despite a massive and increasing burden [...]