URI biomedical engineering students create wrist pulse simulator to diagnose illnesses

University of Rhode Island engineering students wants to take your pulse-28 different ways. The students are creating a silicone wrist that simulates the 28 pulse patterns used in traditional Chinese medicine to diagnose various diseases.
Ian Kanterman, Mackenzie Mitchell, and Jake Morris will present the “Wrist Pulse Simulator” to the Undergraduate Design Competition of the Northeast Bioengineering Conference March 28 at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
“This project reminds us that science and medicine are universal,” Kanterman says, “but done in various ways.” Most are familiar with the Western way: A healthcare worker places two fingers on a patient’s wrist to measure one thing: heart rate.
In traditional Chinese medicine, pulse diagnosis using three fingers with different compression pressures is a more developed process, a tool practitioners use to detect diseases, like liver failure.
Training a practitioner to find all those pulse patterns on one person can be difficult, if not impossible. The silicone wrist created by the URI students solves that problem by mimicking the pulse points, and it also provides a valuable teaching tool.