Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Jeffsolves With Student Innovation

Thomas Jefferson University Research Magazine

The JeffSolves MedTech program teams industrial design and medical students to develop innovative solutions to specific healthcare problems. Having chosen particular, concrete challenges faced by medical patients, student teams collaborate to conduct in-depth user research and problem identification, develop potentially marketable solutions and create prototype products. “The solutions these teams create are consistently remarkable and effective,” says Bon Ku, MD, assistant dean for health and design at Sidney Kimmel Medical College.

A Design For Mitigating Patient Hypothermia

Thomas Jefferson University Research Magazine

General anesthesia during surgery can impair the body’s autonomic temperature regulation and lead to patients having dangerously low body temperature. That, in turn, increases an array of clinical risks, including poor wound healing and infection, excess blood loss, cardiac arrhythmias and impaired renal function. Unfortunately, current surgical gowns— which have very little thermal capability—provide no significant protection against heat loss.

For that reason, a cross-disciplinary team of Jefferson students and faculty—with expertise in anesthesiology, mechanical engineering, textile engineering, textile technology and fashion design—is creating a new type of patient garment that is intended to mitigate the problem of surgically related …