Medical Delta KTO-WOW! Awards for new generation of Clinical Technologists

Although the oxygen level in the blood of newly operated newborns is measured every second, it is only stored once a minute. Useful data to keep a close eye on fluctuations is therefore lost. A group of graduates from the Clinical Technology course, in collaboration with Erasmus MC and Sophia Children's Hospital, devised a new and better method to properly display the multitude of data for clinicians, while data storage is limited.

They won a Medical Delta KTO-WOW! Award at the annual closing symposium of the Clinical Technology course. This training is provided in a Medical Delta context by TU Delft, the LUMC and the Erasmus MC.

During the KTO closing symposium, 109 bachelor students showed impressive examples of technological innovations for healthcare that they developed together with medical centers.

Global approach to antibiotic resistance

It was not the only group of students to win an award. A team of graduates that built a prototype of a meter for bacterial resistance to antibiotics also received this honor. Bacterial antibiotic resistance is a threat to global health care. Carbapenems are antibiotics that are often used as a last resort for bacterial infections when other antibiotics no longer work because of their broad range of action. You want to do that as little as possible, because bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics and are therefore increasingly difficult to combat. Surveillance – the continuous collection and analysis of data on antibiotic resistance of bacteria – is important in combating the global spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but developing countries are lagging behind.

The winning graduation project built and validated a prototype UV spectrophotometer capable of detecting carbapenem resistant bacteria. A UV spectrophotometer is a device that shines UV light on a sample and then measures how much UV light is transmitted through it, demonstrating the presence or absence of resistant bacteria. It costs less than € 150 to copy the prototype and only € 0.35 to perform a measurement with it. All electronics of the prototype are available worldwide; the housing is fully 3D printed. The ultimate goal is to put the device's blueprints and manuals online for free for anyone to reproduce and use. Quite a few steps still need to be taken before this happens, but it is a step towards global surveillance, the students said.

Online symposium

The closing symposium for Bachelor's students of Clinical Technology was also online this year. During the festive closing, the students presented their graduation projects to the jury, to teachers and to family and friends. As every year, there were surprising new technological solutions for healthcare. For healthcare technological innovations, the road from idea to ultimate application in healthcare practice is long and complicated. The company Cue2Walk therefore shared its experiences and showed the graduates how they go through this process.

The completion of their bachelor's degree gives students access to the two-year master's program in Clinical Technology. After their diploma, they may use the protected professional title of 'Clinical Technologist' and register in the BIG register. This makes them an officially registered healthcare provider with independent treatment authorizations.