ME450 Capstone Design and Manufacturing Experience: Fall 2015Under anesthesia, a patient's body loses its ability to regulate temperature, resulting in a core-to-peripheral redistribution of body temperature. This causes perioperative hypothermia, or hypothermia during surgery, which leads to a number of complications, such as increased risk of infection, prolonged recovery, and increased costs to both the patient and hospital. Based on many weeks of needs assessment over summer 2016, secondary public hospitals in the Dominican Republic lack methods for regulating and monitoring patient temperature during surgery, and current solutions on the market are often designed for specific use, require manual control, are not reusable, and are expensive. The prototype described in this journal consists of a underbody warming mattress placed over the operating bed to warm the patient via radiation and conduction, insulating surgical drapes to prevent radiant and convective heat loss, and a PID control system that automates temperature adjustment in response to feedback from non-invasive core body temperature measurement at the tympanic membrane and internal sensors (thermistors) as fail-safes. This project will be continued through M-HEAL, and the team plans to return to the Dominican Republic to network with new and existing stakeholders and gather user feedback on the design.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117346/1/ME450-F15-Project06-FinalReport.pd
