BME Students Improve Clinical Care With Capstone Project

When patients experience kidney failure, fluid buildup and swelling occur because their kidneys don’t remove waste and extra water from the blood the way healthy kidneys do. Dr. Bijin Thajudeen treats these patients by helping them eliminate excess fluid with medications or dialysis.

“The problem is, that’s based on a judgment I make as a physician, and I can go wrong, because each human body is different. I might be overdoing or underdoing, which could result in bad outcomes in my patients,” said Thajudeen, a mentor for Interdisciplinary Capstone Team 22054. He’s also chief of the nephrology service at Banner – University Medical Center South campus and a College of Medicine – Tucson associate professor.

Patients with kidney failure, and medical professionals like Thajudeen, would benefit from a device that digitally measures the body’s water content, or impedance, and edema, or swelling, to guide more precise treatment.

For their capstone project, Team 22054 built a wearable, stocking-like device that measures impedance by applying constant voltage and current to a four-electrode circuit and determining the resistance value, then extrapolating the amount of edema. An accelerometer detects movements associated with RLS motion. The data goes to an app for patients and physicians to view.

Team lead and BME major Spencer Ciammitti is excited the project includes both hardware and software components.

“It’s meshing those two worlds, and it’s cool to kind of get to brag for my team about that, because our project is big and ambitious,” he said.

The project is sponsored by BME clinical professor Marvin Slepian/ACABI and the Kidney ADVANCE Project/NIH.