BME Students Improve Health-Boosting Breathing Device

Cardiovascular exercise like running certainly gets you breathing faster, but breathing itself can be its own form of exercise. For its 2023 senior capstone project, a team of five University of Arizona engineering undergrads enhanced a novel breath training device, and now the accompanying regimen is moving toward the market with the potential to improve health for millions of people.

Capstone team 23030 developed an Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST) device, which patients use to perform breathing exercises that help lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The device and its training regimen are designed for older adults; however, this type of training has also been shown to benefit young healthy adults and adults with a range of health problems, according to sponsor advisor E. Fiona Bailey. The professor of physiology works with the BIO5 Institute.

While many breath training devices exist, the product the student team developed offers accurate pressure sensing and pairs with an app that provides intuitive feedback as it guides users through assessment steps necessary to establish the ideal training plan.

“The students assigned to the project did a fantastic job,” said Bailey.

The students had access to a breathing device Bailey had fabricated in 2012 and to new, commercially available models for comparison. The team was tasked with developing a hand-held design that could store data from at least a month of training sessions, permit download of data and guide the user through the training program.

For Dylan McGuire, a 2023 BME graduate and the project’s student team leader, one of the most important lessons he learned was how to delegate responsibilities to keep the project progressing and meet deadlines.

McGuire worked with two additional biomedical engineering majors and two systems engineering majors.

“It was important to utilize all members of the team and direct them according to what each of their strengths were,” McGuire said. “I feel this is a vital skill to have, especially when preparing to enter the workforce.”