A team of five undergraduate students developed a special lens for patients suffering from forms of paralysis that leave them unable to blink and hydrate their eyes.

The “HydrEYE CorneOasis Lens” led to a $10,000 first-place finish in the BMEStart Competition, a contest organized for undergraduate biomedical aspirants. A portion of the prize money will go toward the development of the lens.

Andrew DiMeo, senior design instructor for the Department of Biomedical Engineering senior design program, said the process started as a part of the team’s coursework. 

“In the senior design program we assign teams, and each team has to come up with an idea from scratch. It is a five-phase process, which starts from needs assessment and ends with the testing and maintenance of the prototype,” DiMeo said.

The winning team was: Alex McGaughy, Eli Pollack, Roya Nezarati, Elizabeth Kirik and Trinh Doan. 

The group started off with their work at the WakeMed Cary Hospital. There they found out that certain patients were facing problems when blinking their eyes – either due to injury or paralysis of certain face muscles.

The doctors used eye drops, Vaseline or Saran Wrap to keep the patients’ eyes hydrated. 

“This problem struck us the most. We decided to work on it and come up with a feasible solution,” McGaughy said.

The team worked with several outside groups, including the physicians in WakeMed’s neurology unit, pharmaceutical companies and the patients themselves. 

The team had to apply for the competition in May, but their entry was practically complete even before the application date.

“By the time they applied for the competition, they had done almost all the work already in their senior design program,” DiMeo said.

Over the year, the team developed a connection with the project, said Nezarati. “We interacted with a lot of people and our hard work paid off in the end. I think the project was successful because of the problem it addressed. We are glad and proud to have achieved this kind of success,” said Nezarati.

McGaughy attributes his team’s success to the senior design program and its instructor. “I think this is an outstanding course. Everything needed for the competition was already ready as a part of our coursework,” McGaughy said.

Now that the prototype is developed, future work on this project will include ways to enable mass manufacture of the product with different materials. 

“I hope that the graduate students take up this project and take it ahead. We have a graduate-level medical device development course corresponding to the senior design program,” DiMeo said.