The objective of this project is to begin development of an automated emergency airway access medical device which would allow a non-medically trained individual to create an emergency front of neck airway (FONA) on an adult with an airway obstruction when other immediate medical interventions are not available or have not been successful. Airway obstructions that cannot be resolved by less invasive measures, also known as “Can’t Intubate, Can’t Oxygenate” or CICO situations, are fatal in a matter of minutes without immediate medical attention. All currently available treatments for patients in CICO situations can only be performed by highly trained medical providers. A cricothyrotomy is a surgical airway procedure where a medical provider creates an incision in the cricothyroid membrane (CTM), which is between the thyroid and cricoid cartilage, to place a tube into the trachea. This is the common method of choice by trained medical providers because it is quick, does not require significant surgical preparation or equipment, and occurs in a region further from major blood vessels compared to other surgical airway procedures. However, cricothyrotomies can have varying levels of success due to the difficulty of identifying the proper location, and improper technique. The process to perform a cricothyrotomy can be aided by specific cricothyrotomy kits which provide a trained medical professional with the necessary equipment to perform the procedure. However, this still requires the individual performing the procedure to provide significant manual input with minimal guidance and a high amount of uncertainty. There is currently no commonly available device which helps automate both the position locating and airway creation process. The team has developed a prototype for a device that aims to perform a needle tracheostomy by a non-medical professional in the event of an airway emergency.

Our team collaborated with Biomedical Engineering 7,Multidisciplinary Engineering 2 on this project.