4/07

1st Place Undergraduate Expo Award Senior Design Projects

Design and Development of a CPR Mattress
Advisor: Dr. Ryan Gilbert
Sponsor: Portage Health

Team Members: Andrew Delvaux, Josh Dykla, Chris Rivet, Matt Trombley

Project summary

Hospital patients with cardiovascular disease may require cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Currently, the bed headboard is placed under the patient to enable the compressive force to be dispersed into the thoracic cavity and not the underlying mattress. We have designed a mattress insert connected to a vacuum pump. With this design, the mattress underneath the chest cavity deflates, making the mattress a rigid surface. Using a device that measures compression depth (Thumper) with corresponding software (CPRView), we were able to show that our design yielded better compression depths than the current practice of using a headboard on top of the mattress.