Heart of the Matter
Heart failure patients are readmitted to the hospital at an alarming rate — as many as 25% within 30 days of their initial hospital stay.
“No patient or family member wants that stress, and it’s expensive for insurers and hospitals,” says Robert Gordanier, a former U.S. Army medic and member of the Stevens senior design team that won first place and a $10,000 prize in this year’s Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition for a device designed to address the problem.
CardioLink™ is a home-based device that monitors heart metrics and transmits the data directly to healthcare providers so they can immediately address potential problems and help avoid a return to the hospital. The team, which is pursuing patent protections and can’t share details, believes their product to be more comprehensive — collecting a wider range of data — than anything currently on the market.
Thanks to the team’s medical advisor, engineer-turned-emergency-department-physician Herman Morchel M.Eng. ’80, the team is initiating discussions with stakeholders at Hackensack Meridian Health to explore the feasibility of partnering with them on a future pilot program.
“The network at Stevens is very powerful, and Dr. Morchel is an amazing physician, and an engineer,” says Gordanier. “He has been so generous with his time, helping us understand the clinical side and how hospitals integrate new systems. Plus, he’s connected us with cardiologists who’ve helped us understand the nuances of heart failure and what metrics to look for.”
The team of four bioengineering majors, all Class of 2025 — Gordanier, Rhys Robichaud, Sean Shea and Panos Stamas — were initially inspired by Stamas’ physician uncle, who suggested they tackle the problem. The project became personal, says Gordanier, when he realized it might have helped his late grandmother, who had endured that endless cycle of hospital readmissions after being diagnosed with heart failure.
“It became a passion project for all of us,” Gordanier says.
The Ansary prize goes to the team that delivers the best “elevator pitch,” a short speech meant to persuade investors to fund their project. This is the second year in a row that the prize, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary [see sidebar], has gone to a biomedical engineering team, and the advisor for both teams has been Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering Peter Popolo.
“People are deeply interested in technological advances in medicine, so biomedical engineering is increasingly relevant and popular,” says Popolo. “And CardioLink™ has the potential to benefit a lot of people.”
Inspired by their success in the competition, and with a lot of advice from their Stevens business professors, the team is spending the prize money on patent attorneys and looking for seed money to continue to build CardioLink™ Technologies.
“We’re full-speed ahead,” says Stamas. “Raising money is important, but it’s really about the mission. And I think that’s what brought us together as a team — wanting to have an impact, because that’s what engineers do.”
– Joan Cramer