In a senior-year seminar and lab in the Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), officially called BME Design Group 580.411, the task for the academic year was this: Go to the university database - described as a medical-community wish list-find a need that has not been met and develop a design to solve it. Simple as that. "The course was called Design Team, colloquially, among the students," says Ravy Vajravelu, a senior during the project who collaborated with his roommate and three other students to form the team (four seniors and one sophomore) that tackled the task.The JHU database is huge, explains Joshua Lerman, Vajravelu's roommate and team leader. It collects local submissions from physicians and nurses in the Baltimore area into a working database developed by the JHU BME department. Lerman recognized that many of the needs catalogued could not be met in a single year, and his team needed to locate an item and create a product that could be put to use by a real patient by the year's end.
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