Pictured: The minds behind a prototype diaper detection strip meant to help confirm Urinary Tract Infection biomarkers.
By Tina Shelton, JABSOM Communications Director
Every year, something is guaranteed to knock your socks off at the Annual Biomedical and Health Disparities Symposium on the campus of the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaiʻi.
“If you notice our border is actually a progression of our prototypes,” Mari Ogino, University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa (UHM) Engineering Student begins to describe her team’s poster, an entry in the 2018 Biomedical Sciences and Health Disparities Symposium, held on the campus of the UHM John A. Burns School of Medicine.
On it are prototypes for a test strip. A proposed “diaper detection system” to alert doctors and nurses early when incontinent patients develop a urinary tract infection (UTI). Early diagnosis can be a matter of life and death.
Elise Chong, like Ogino, an engineering student, explains, “8% of elderly who do come into the Emergency Room with a UTI diagnosis they do end up passing away due to complications.”
Ogino likens the strip’s function to a pregnancy test kit. “It kind of functions like a pregnancy test and it can take the urine from the patient and it can flow through the strip and what it does is it actually detects whether or not there are certain biomarkers indicative of a UTI within the urine so if there are the biomarkers then there’s going to be a color change on the strip that would actually tell us okay this person does have a UTI,” said Ogino.
The Biomedical Sciences and Health Disparities Symposium at the UH medical school brings together college students, graduate students, medical students, doctors and faculty in all specialties and at all levels, to THINK TOGETHER.
“Our team has two bioengineers, a med student and a kidney researcher,” said Chong. “So it’s really important to get the different perspectives and I really want to move healthcare forward to help the lives of people who really need that sort of help so in this case the elderly.”
Bryce Tanaka, a third-year medical student (MD 2020) was upbeat about the collaboration as well. “The application we feel is early diagnosis and with early diagnosis and I guess a more specific kind of diagnosis you’d be able to treat urinary tract infections prior to them becoming very complicated,” he said.
So then … What’s your idea? Join us at the Biomedical Sciences & Health Disparities Symposium held each April at the University of Hawaii Kakaʻako Campus.