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SAINT JOHN — A New Brunswick high school student has proposed environmentally-friendly heart monitoring sensors that use excess material sourced from lobster shells — and she hopes they can be adopted at hospitals across the province.
Melody Ovuakporoyecha, an advanced placement student at St. Malachy’s Memorial in Saint John, has researched and developed alternative electrodes that are are biodegradable, compostable and reusable.
The electrodes traditionally used in hospitals are chemically-heavy plastic sensors that end up in landfills.
Ovuakporoyecha says the ones she researched are also less irritating on a patient’s skin, leading to greater comfort in particular for older people while still reliably conducing the electrical signal needed to monitor heart rates.
And, she hopes it’s an innovation that one day be used widely.
“I’m originally from Nigeria, so I’ve seen first-hand how gaps in health-care systems can affect people and that stayed with me,” Ovuakporoyecha said in a recent phone interview.
“So it made me want to explore solutions that are not only innovative, but also accessible. I also wanted to make an impact locally, starting in Saint John, and to think about how innovations like this could benefit my communities before scaling it further.”
The work by Ovuakporoyecha and 10 of her younger peers, along with guidance from three teachers, won national recognition last month in Toronto.
St. Malachy’s Memorial High School was named the winner out of eight finalists for Samsung’s Solve for Tomorrow challenge — and claimed $50,000 in Samsung technology vouchers for upgrades to their school.
Ovuakporoyecha was researching how prosthetic limbs interact with the nervous system when she came across hydrogels — a plastic-like material that can absorb and hold large amounts of water while maintaining a shape.
And she figured out they work well as bio sensors because they’re conductive, don’t irritate the skin and have anti-bacterial properties.
Raw shell waste is a byproduct of the commerical seafood industry. The students’ innovation proposes isolating a polymer called chitin that is then processed into a biocompatible powder called chitosan.
That powder is then formed into the hydrogel that, say the researchers, is safe to use as a bio sensor on patients.
Ovuakporoyecha didn’t do the work alone.
Earlier in the school year, she and her Grade 12 AP research peers pitched AP seminar students a year younger on their projects.
Rhailyn Pyke, one of the Grade 11 students who signed up to Ovuakporoyecha’s project, was tasked with looking into a potential adverse effect of the idea: seafood allergies.
