Breathing Safe with Airway Innovations
Photo by: David Chandler
N EU - 2015
As a Grand Valley State University graduate student, Spectrum Health Innovations’ product design engineering graduate assistant, and the brains behind Airway Innovations, Eric VanMiddendorp found himself extremely busy during the past year.
additional clamps and patient restraints to prevent self extubation. However, these materials have proven ineffective. With Airway Innovations, VanMiddendorp has designed a standalone device that does not allow the option of unplanned extubation, thus, keeping patients safe from their own reflexes. Over time, Airway Innovations proved itself to be a product that challenges the current system of medical device design. “You need to rethink it in order to solve a problem,” he said.
Through Airway Innovations,VanMiddendorp offers a new and exceptionally innovative solution to a long-standing problem found within current medical centers.VanMiddendorp’s product is essential to reducing patient health risk from unplanned extubation, which means a patient is not able to remove their inserted breathing tube. The problem of unplanned extubation, often the result of self extubation, creates hazardous conditions for the patient.
Airway Innovations also aims to improve patient comfort and ease the transition into consciousness. However simple of an idea it may seem, Airway Innovations’ solution is revolutionary in the field of medical tools. The persistent problem of self extubation, which occurs with eight to twenty percent of all patients, has been struggled with for decades without remedy.
VanMiddendorp began working on this issue through an innovation grant between GVSU and Spectrum Health Innovations because it touched close to home. His nephew, born three months premature, self extubated.“Luckily, he was OK, but that’s not always the case,” said VanMiddendorp. The choice to work on this case came from a place of empathy and understanding, and provided an extreme challenge for VanMiddendorp.
VanMiddendorp’s dedication, talent, and ambition has paid off in full. Presently, VanMiddendorp is collaborating with an industrial designer and a design engineer for Airway Innovations’ prototype. With an entire year of work under his belt, he is working on manufacturing and eventual FDA approval, while continuing to fine-tune his product. “Design is an iterative process, so we’re constantly going back and getting more feedback, improving the prototype and taking all their considerations into account,” he said.
One of the main challenges during his design process appeared at the very beginning. VanMiddendorp admitted, “I was very ambitious.” He spent two months conducting extensive research by reading as much literature as possible, and most importantly, placing himself in the midst of the hospital environment to better understand all perspectives involved in unplanned extubation. In doing so, VanMiddendorp talked to Spectrum clinicians, respiratory therapists, nurses, and surgeons. He said he wanted to gain a full understanding of “why [unplanned extubation] happens and how it’s currently controlled.”
This willingness to listen and dedication to meeting patients’ speaks to an empathy that could result in extreme success for VanMiddendorp early on in his career. Lives are valuable, and any technology that could save or extend human lives will always be in high demand, and Airway Innovations is doing that through design thinking practices. By engaging a problem and addressing it with design thinking,VanMiddendorp will make a real difference in lives of individuals across the world.
First, he learned that unplanned extubation happens out of human instinct; “It’s a natural reflex,” explained VanMiddendorp. He then learned that current breathing tubes on the market use clamps to attach to the patient’s mouth, requiring the use of
Eric VanMiddendorp:
Bachelor of Science in Product Design and Manufacturing Engineering, minor in Biomedical Engineering Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering
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