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A team at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute is working on what they hope will be the first New Zealand designed Class 3 medical device – a pressure sensor for the brain, to help people with hydrocephalus. Claire visits the team to find out about the different aspects of the design and how the sensor works.
On this week’s Our Changing World, a research group from the Auckland Bioengineering Institute discuss the medical device they are designing to help people with hydrocephalus.
In hydrocephalus, increased fluid around the brain increases the pressure, which leads to different symptoms and problems. Before the invention of an implantable shunt to drain this fluid, hydrocephalus was almost universally fatal.
Unfortunately, these shunts fail quite often. Some of the most common early symptoms of a shunt failing are nausea and headache, which can create a lot of uncertainty and anxiety amongst patients and their families. Is the headache they are experiencing due to shunt failure, or something more innocuous?
By designing a brain pressure sensor that can be implanted in patients alongside the shunt, Simon Malpas and his team hope they can relieve this uncertainty by providing a way to directly measure brain pressure. This would help patients know whether their shunt was still working well or not. In this week’s episode, Simon and the team explain how they design and test the sensor, and how it works.
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