Engineering Students' Ischiban Project Wins at Cincinnati Innovates!

A team of University of Cincinnati students was awarded a total of $15,000 at the recent Cincinnati Innovates Award Ceremony. They earned the Taft Legal/Patent Award ($10,000) and the Northern Kentucky Vision 2015 Award ($5,000) for their work on Ischiban, a device that pushes the limits on early stroke detection. In the past three years, over 1,000 people have participated in the Cincinnati Innovates competition. The UC student team was one of 12 that went on to win this year.
 
 

Students from the Biomedical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Industrial Design Programs at UC worked together to develop a device that has the potential to be a game changer in the early detection and treatment of strokes. The device, Ischiban, can quickly determine the type of stroke a patient is suffering. According to the creators, Pooja Kadambi(BME graduate, currently EE grad student and participating in an emergency medicine fellowship), Joe Lovelace(EE graduate currently working at a family business), Scott Robinson (BME graduate currently employed at Alphatec Spine) and Alex Androski (industrial design graduate), Ischiban allows for earlier diagnosis, faster treatment and improved recovery rates for patients.

Ischiban was developed as a senior capstone project for UC’s Medical Device Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program (MDIEP). It was a five-month intensive effort that aimed to solve problems through a combination of innovative engineering and design.

UC students were approached by a Boston firm that had come up with a way to use impedance measurements across the brain to detect blood flow changes. Thus, the UC team's challenge was to apply this new technology as a new way for diagnosing strokes. The students worked to make the system sensitive enough to be in contact with the patient’s skin but strong enough to penetrate through hair, in order to prevent shaving the patients head.

UC's Team Ischiban was able to create a device that fits on a patient’s head and speeds up the process of determining which type of stroke a patient is suffering.

Ischiban works by sending signals from the front to the back of the patients head. It is a headband device that measures the electrical conductivity of tissue and is able to differentiate between an ischemic stroke and a hemorrhagic stroke. This is essential in determining the proper treatment. Ischiban is able to uncover the type of stroke the patient is experiencing in just five minutes without harmful exposure to radiation. The current EEG imaging tools can take as long as 40-90 minutes. The ability to shorten the time of diagnosis, allows for a faster treatment and improved recovery rate.

In addition to being a stroke diagnostic tool, Ischiban can also be used as a platform for neural monitoring and diagnosis.