The James Dyson Foundation, which operates worldwide, continues to support young engineers. Thanks to the international design competition held in 29 countries, young engineers, designers and students James Dyson Award with rewards. Finally, the winner of this award in Turkey has been announced. Here are the details…
“PhysioCircle” became the Turkey winner of the James Dyson Award
The “PhysioCircle” project, which ensures the correct and effective application of the chest physiotherapy method to patients by physiotherapists or their relatives, was awarded £5,000 as the national winner of the Turkish leg of the 2022 James Dyson Award.
Respiratory diseases are increasing all over the world. In addition to the developing diagnosis and treatment methods, the gradual increase in the average life expectancy is considered as an important reason for the increase in respiratory tract diseases in terms of chronic diseases.
Worldwide, more than 9.2 million people with respiratory diseases spend 1 or 2 hours on their daily treatments to clear the mucus layer accumulated in the airways and to breathe comfortably. While patients living in developing countries may prefer medical devices for this daily treatment; low-income patients have less chance of accessing these expensive devices.
The most important point about chest physiotherapy is that this method can be applied to patients at any place and time without the need for additional costs, while the accuracy and effectiveness of this treatment is directly related to the knowledge and experience of the practitioner. In addition, there is only 1 physiotherapist who has received chest physiotherapy training for every thousand patients around the world.
This year’s Turkish national James Dyson Award winner “PhysioCircle” focuses on solving this problem. PhysioCircle, a medical training vest that enables physiotherapists and their relatives to apply the chest physiotherapy method to patients accurately and effectively; It helps to clear the mucus layer accumulated in the airways of respiratory patients, allowing patients to breathe comfortably.
Chest physiotherapy, which is a relaxing pulmonary rehabilitation method, helps the thick and sticky mucus layer accumulated in the lungs to be physically removed from the airways and thus the patient can cough up the mucus out of the body. The severity, speed and position of the hand hits made by the practitioner on certain points on the lungs are considered very important for the protection of patient health. For this reason, high-tech sensors are used in the PhysioCircle that provide precise measurement. While there are different simulation products used for educational purposes in the field of medicine, there are no educational products related to respiratory physiotherapy. For this reason, PhysioCircle stands out as the first and only training product developed in this field.
PhysioCircle, which includes a smart physiotherapy vest, adult training dummy, tablet and desktop app; With ten sensors on the vest, it can detect the location, intensity, frequency and duration data of each hit by the users. This data collected in real time is transferred to the cloud system via Bluetooth.
The adult training dummy provides real human dimensions and feel, enhancing the user experience. In the tablet application, there are chest physiotherapy exercises that allow different patient cases to be experienced. By using these exercises, students can practice chest physiotherapy over the smart vest whenever and wherever they want.
In addition, trainers can add their own physiotherapy programs to the application. In this way, students can practice by seeing cases that they may encounter in real life in a simulation environment. While the data of all physiotherapy exercises performed by the students can be viewed on the desktop application, detailed reports of each student can be accessed by the instructor.
In this way, it is possible for the students to learn the application method easily, while it is possible for the instructors to follow the whole process digitally.James Dyson Award National Winner Selami Erdogan He used the following statements about the award:
Regularly following national and international competitions and examining the winning projects allows me to improve myself as a designer. The James Dyson Award was one of the valuable international competitions I followed in this field. I was intrigued by the fact that the winning projects were not just an idea or a design project, but were the result of teamwork, with the technical details of which were well thought out.
For this reason, I decided to participate in this competition with PhysioCircle, which I believe is strong in terms of applicability and technique. This award increased the motivation of me and my teammates to work on design solutions to improve the quality of life of respiratory patients. With this success I have achieved, I will continue to work for PhysioCircle to reach more people..