A teen scientist's invention to help wounds heal | Anushka Naiknaware

251,197 views ・ 2018-06-19

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Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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Ever since I was a young girl, I was always fascinated --
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(Laughter)
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Oh!
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(Laughter)
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OK, I meant younger and more short.
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(Laughter)
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If that's possible to imagine.
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But ever since I was a young girl,
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I was always fascinated with how the world worked exactly how it did.
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So this, very early on,
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led me to the fields of mathematics and chemistry.
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I would keep going further and further, and as I kept going,
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I realized that all the fields of science are interconnected.
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And without one, the others have little or no value.
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So, inspired by Marie Curie and my local science museum,
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I decided to start asking these questions myself
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and engage in my own independent research,
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whether it be out of my garage or my bedroom.
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I started reading journal papers,
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started doing science competitions,
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started participating in science fairs,
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doing anything I could
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to get the knowledge that I so desperately wanted.
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So while I was studying anatomy for a competition,
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I came across the topic of something called chronic wounds.
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And one thing that stood out to me was a statistic
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that said that the number of people in the United States with chronic wounds
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exceeds the number of people with breast cancer,
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colon cancer, lung cancer and leukemia, combined.
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Hold up.
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So what is a chronic wound?
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(Laughter)
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And why haven't I heard about a 5K walk for chronic wounds,
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why haven't I even heard about a chronic wound in general?
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(Laughter)
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So after I got past those preliminary questions,
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and one that I will clarify for you,
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a chronic wound is essentially when someone gets a normal wound,
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except it fails to heal normally
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because the patient has some kind of preexisting condition,
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which in most cases is diabetes.
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So more staggering statistics were to be found
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as I kept going on in this research.
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In the year 2010 alone,
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50 billion dollars were spent worldwide to treat chronic wounds.
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In addition, it's estimated that about two percent of the population
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will get a chronic wound at some point in their lifetime.
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This was absurd.
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So as I started doing more research,
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I found that there was a correlation
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between the moisture level inside a wound dressing
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and the stage of healing that the chronic wound would be at.
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So I decided, why don't I design something
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to measure the moisture level within the wound
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so this can help doctors and patients treat their wounds better.
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And essentially, expedite the healing process.
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So that's exactly what I set out to do.
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Being a 14-year-old working out of her garage-turned-lab,
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I had a lot of constraints.
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Most being that I wasn't given a grant, I wasn't given a lot of money,
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and I wasn't given a lot of resources.
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In addition, I had a lot of criteria, as well.
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Since this product would be readily interacting with the body,
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it had to be biocompatible,
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it also had to be low-cost,
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as I was designing it and paying for it myself.
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It also had to be mass-manufacturable,
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because I wanted it to be made anywhere, for anyone.
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Thus, I drafted up a schematic.
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What you see on the left hand-side is the early schematics in my design,
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showing both a bird's-eye view and also one stacking variant.
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A stacking variant means
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that the entire product is consisted of different individual parts
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that have to work in unison.
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And what's shown there is one possible arrangement.
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So what exactly is this?
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So I had gone on to testing my sensors
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and as all scientists have stumbles along their work,
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I also had a couple of problems in my first generation of sensors.
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First of all, I couldn't figure out
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how to get a nanoparticle ink into a printcheck cartridge
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without spilling it all over my carpet.
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That was problem number one.
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Problem number two was,
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I couldn't exactly control the sensitivity of my sensors.
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I couldn't scale them up or down,
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I couldn't really do anything of that sort.
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So I wanted something to solve it.
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Problem one was easily solved by some scouting on eBay and Amazon
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for syringes that I could use.
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Problem two, however, required a lot more thought.
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So this is where this factors in.
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So what a space-filling curve does
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is it aims to take up all the area it can within one unit square.
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And by writing a computer program, you can have different iterations
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of the different curve,
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which increasingly get close to one unit square,
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but never quite reaches there.
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So now I could control the thickness, the size,
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I could do whatever I want with it, and I could predict my results.
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So I started constructing my sensors
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and testing them more rigorously,
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using money that I had gotten from previous science fair awards.
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Lastly, I had to connect this data in order to be read.
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So I interfaced it with a Bluetooth chip,
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which you can see here by the app screenshots on the right.
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And what this does is that anyone can monitor the progress of their wound,
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and it can be transmitted over a wireless connection
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to the doctor, the patient or whoever needs it.
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[Continued Testing and Refinement]
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So in conclusion, my design was successful --
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however, science never ends.
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There's always something to be done, something to be refined.
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So that's what I'm currently in the process of doing.
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However, what I learned was
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what's more important than the actual thing I designed
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is an attitude that I had taken on while doing this.
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And that attitude was,
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even though I'm a 14-year-old working in her garage
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on something that she doesn't completely understand,
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I could still make a difference and contribute to the field.
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And that's what inspired me to keep going,
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and I hope it inspires many others to also do work like this
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even though they're not very sure about it.
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So I hope that's a message that you all take on today.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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