Wound dressing warns of infection

MEDICAL PRODUCTS:THREE STUDENTS from Belfast have developed a potentially life-saving medical dressing that warns hospital staff if a wound has become infected. It is still under development but an international company that manufactures medical products has expressed interest in their work.

Bobby Tang, Michael Zhang and Richard Stewart are upper sixth students attending the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. Together they researched and developed a prototype wound dressing that warns of infection.

“We were interested in medical research and looked at ideas involving infection and how to detect it,” Michael said.

They looked at a number of methods of dressing wounds and realised that very little work had been done on changes in pH, a measure of high or low acidity, associated with bacterial infections. A wound typically would be like water, neutral with a pH of seven, Richard said. The presence of infection makes the wound slightly acidic and so pH looked like a way to detect infection.

They developed a way to test for pH and believe a simple colour-change response might provide the most easy-to-use system. They are also looking at the use of a hand-held colour imager that would give very accurate readings of any pH change, Bobby said.

Fourth-year students Sarah Powell and Aoife McElroy were also looking at human welfare but from a different perspective: the provision of pure drinking water. The 15-year-olds developed a low-cost water filter and then tested its performance against a popular home filtration system.

They wanted it to take care of solids, odours, chemical pollutants, metals and chlorine. They put their sand-and-charcoal filter through its paces against the commercial product, and found that it performed very well and in some cases better.

It produced lower levels for chemicals and metals than the commercial product, including chlorine and zinc. It did not do quite as well against lead, but their filter still reduced lead to below recommended safe levels.

Sarah and Aoife believe that their design, which cost less than €20 to build, could be of use in the developing world.