Prof M Manivannan, Department of Applied Mechanics, IIT-Madras and his team has created a haptic device – a CPR mannequin to practise the CPR technique and improve its efficiency. Prof Manivannan shares more details about the device and its advantages, in an interaction with Lakshmipriya Nair
Give us a detailed overview of the haptic device – a CPR mannequin created by you? How does it work?
CPR is a basic first-aid technique that all the medical community (professionals, students and paramedics) should know. The general public should have this skill as well. The technique involves compressing the chest to 4-5 cm 120 times a minute, and more importantly this should be done in a short time window – in the first 10 minutes of the cardiac arrest, called as golden minutes. If you compress the chest lesser than 4 cm or slower than 120 time a minute, the first-aid technique is not effective. If you compress more than 5 cm there is a risk of breaking the chest bones. Therefore, the technique should be practised well before on dummy simulators. However, the existing dummy simulators are far from real chests, so when you do CPR on a real patient after training on unrealistic chest dummies, the human chest feels entirely different and the first aid technique becomes ineffective.
Our main innovation is to design a realistic chest for practising CPR first aid technique. When you get trained on our CPR simulator, the real chest is no more alien to you – the effectiveness of the CPR improves.
Our laboratory in IIT Madras is a haptics lab or touch lab. We design haptic devices for medical simulators. We looked at the CPR design from the haptic device point of view. No one has looked at it this way before, and that is where our innovation stands apart from the rest of the simulators available in the world.
How will the device help in improving healthcare delivery?
Ideally you need a real human chest for practicing the CPR technique, however that is prohibited because it would harm the human being on whom you are practising. Next ideal solution is to practice on a simulator that is close to a real human chest. That is where our CPR comes into the picture. Other CPR simulators are very different from the real human chest. As a result, training on our simulator improves the CPR performance, and therefore survival rate improves.
How will it be useful for a country like India which is looking for affordable yet effective healthcare solutions?
There are no CPR simulators made in India. We only import these simulators at exorbitant costs for these simple devices. Apart from the customs duty, most of the cost goes to the middle-men and the government officials as bribe. These two major elements of the cost if removed, the simulators become affordable even to remove villages in India. India lives in it villages. Any technology we make, should be affordable to Indian villages. Our innovation makes it affordable to Indian villages.
Have you test the efficacy of this device? What has been the results?
We have been conducting several rounds of tests. The test results are far superior than what we expected. For compliance sake we need to conduct more tests. We are validating the device with the help of CMC Vellore which is our collaborator.
How do you plan to market the device? Are any tie-ups in the pipeline with healthcare providers?
We are exploring two ways of taking the technology to the market. One is to license the technology to a manufacturer who could own the product, market it and develop it further. The other is to manufacture it ourself and use the existing supply-chain of the CPR simulators in India and abroad to reach the market. We are in discussion with several teams now and I believe we would finalise in the next one or two months.
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