Nursing Students Tackle Real-World Healthcare Needs

Health – UConn Today


Sudden Infant Death Syndrome can strike fear in the heart of a new parent – something Olivia Briggs ’17 (NUR) knows well. When her nephew was a newborn, her sister obsessively bounced in and out of his room to make sure he was still breathing, she recalls. Not long before, a friend of her sister’s lost her baby to SIDS, the cause of 4,000 sleeping-related deaths annually in the United States, according to the American SIDS Institute.
Biomedical engineering students demonstrate a prototype of the Baby Breathing Bed. The concept will be part of the School of Nursing Shark Tank event on April 19. (Sean Flynn/UConn Photo)Briggs’ experience is the inspiration for the Baby Breathing Bed, a sensor-equipped mattress designed to detect impaired breathing in infants and alert parents in time to prevent SIDS. The innovation is one of 21 concepts being presented by teams of UConn seniors on April 19, when the School of Nursing is scheduled to hold its annual Healthcare Innovation “Shark Tank” event, which is part of the school’s ATHENA Research Conference.
“I came up with the idea and brought it to my group thinking that maybe this would be something that parents could use, even if only for peace of mind,” says Briggs. “It might be enough of a comfort for parents just knowing that their child is on this bed and if something were to go wrong, they would get an alert, instead of having to go into the room all the time and check on the infant.”
Last spring, the then third-year nursing students began working in a range of clinical settings. They were organized into teams and asked to come up with an innovation to address a healthcare need they were encountering and that had broad, real-world applicability, says Professor Christine Meehan, who with Professor Anna Bourgault co-directs the Healthcare Innovation Program.
“We are ...

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