Design And Prototype Of An Injection Location Indicator: A Senior Capstone Project And Multiparty Partnership

This paper presents a senior capstone project that was designed to explore the feasibility of using tissue flow impedance to indicate needle location to aid orthopedic injection. Four senior general engineering students designed and developed an instrument to prove this concept for the project client. Over the period of one year, the students experienced the entire process of a real-world engineering project, where they met the client to learn about the problem and discuss his needs; translated these needs into technical requirements; identified, evaluated and selected potential solutions; and implemented and tested the system. The prototype system consisted of a syringe equipped with a force sensor, a displacement sensor, an amplification circuit, and a laptop computer with a LabVIEW program. The LabVIEW program accomplishes data acquisition, converts force and displacement signals to pressure and flow rate, and calculates the tissue flow impedance. After the system was built, two categories of flow impedance data, when the need tip is located in the joints and the tendon, were collected from pig feet. Experimental results demonstrated that tissue flow impedance serves as a good indicator for needle tip locations. The project was financially supported by the university Office of Technology Transfer. This paper describes the technical aspects of the project and discusses the students’ experience, outcome assessment, and the multi-party partnership.