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A Safer Way to Save a Life - Magnetic Assisted Intubation Device (MAID)

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If you ever need a breathing tube inserted into your lungs, you’ll want that procedure to go smoothly. And one out of every 10 times, it doesn’t.

Chipped teeth, damaged vocal chords, cuts to the throat — all are the unfortunate results of intubations gone awry. That’s mostly because intubation requires the person performing the procedure to see the trachea and thread a breathing tube through vocal chords, avoiding the esophagus. When that view is obstructed or misinterpreted, injuries or even death can occur.

A student team competing in the 2011 InVenture competition came up with a way to minimize such injuries during intubation. Their product, called MAID, won second place, and it went on to capture top honors in Georgia Tech’s Business Plan Competition as well as a $50,000 grant from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). Today, it remains a viable candidate for commercialization.

Intubations are currently performed using a laryngoscope, a device that pries open the passage to the trachea so a breathing tube can be inserted. MAID — which stands for magnetically assisted intubation device — guides the tube in place using magnetic force. A removable, magnet-tipped stylet is placed within a breathing tube, and a strong magnet is placed outside the body, by the Adam’s apple. The pull from the magnet steers the tube into proper position.

“This device has the potential to make quite an impact,” says Shawna Hagen (BME ’12), one of the four students behind MAID. “We get very positive feedback from people in several areas of medicine. Paramedics find it intriguing. So do neonatal respiratory nurses, because intubating an infant can be especially difficult.”

The challenge, says fellow team member Alex Cooper (BME ’12), is getting the market to embrace a new approach to a familiar procedure.
“Everyone who does intubation thinks they’re better than the failure rate,” Cooper says. “It’s amazing how many people have told us that it’ll be great for people who are bad at intubation, but that they’d never mess up the procedure.”

Overcoming such a challenge, he says, will require a business partner with experience in marketing and commercialization. Securing that help as well as venture capital now falls primarily to Hagen, who is employed with GTRI. Cooper and their other teammates, Jacob Thompson and Elizabeth Flanagan, are employed full-time elsewhere.

“We’re currently working with Georgia Tech’s Manufacturing Institute to create prototypes of MAID to be used in efficacy testing,” she says. Further proof of MAID’s value may just get medical practitioners to take a second look.

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  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Laura Day
  • Created:09/03/2014
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:10/07/2016

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