Hi 👋
I'm Antoine, a diligent and dynamic designer with a passion for consumer electronics and medical devices.
Always keen for a new technical challenge, I particularly enjoy rapid prototyping, DfMA, reverse engineering, and design optimisation.
Phanes is a wrist-worn Electronic Triage Tag (ETT) that monitors the health and deterioration of earthquake victims to mitigate preventable deaths.
Equipped with a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor, Phanes continuosly monitors casualties’ vital signs and alerts bystanders and medics if they begin to deteriorate.
Phanes was developed with the help of nurses from the world’s largest humanitarian organisations specialising in combat and disaster medicine.
Powered by two 550mAh CR2450 coin-cells and equipped with Zigbee wireless communication capabilities, Phanes greatly increases the capacitity for care in low-resource environments following devestating earthquake-induced disasters.
Phanes is comprised of a protective case made from highly durable Liquid Silicon Rubber, and a ‘sensor widget’ made from glass-filled Nylon that houses all of the electronics. The two are non-porous and easily seperable to ease sterilisation and maintenance between uses.
The quantity and severity of natural disasters is ever-increasing, causing displacement, injury, and death to thousands of people annually.
Globally, earthquakes pose the biggest threat to human life, especially in Low and Middle Income Countries along the Pacific Ring of Fire where citizens are disproportionately susceptible to infrastructure collapse and poor access to public health programmes.
To mitigate loss of life, first responders must accurately identify and address injuries sustained at a rate of 2-3 casualties per minute.
Although policies dictate that casualties should be reassassed every 5-15 minutes once admitted, they often end up waiting hours due to staff and resource shortages, putting them at significant risk of unmarked deterioration and death as they succumb to invisible injuries overlooked during primary assessment.
‘Every year, 45,000 people are killed by natural disasters globally. Earthquakes have accounted for 74% of all disaster-induced fatalities since 1990.’
‘Natural disasters disproportionately impact people in Low-Income Countries. More than 90% of related fatalities occur in regions with a significant Low Income Individual population’
‘Emergency responders are expected to assess a new casualty every 20-30 seconds’
‘39% of victims are incorrectly triaged following a mass-casualty event’
Although multiple ETT systems have been developed in the past, few have ever been comercially successful. The Fraunhofer Institue of Technology issued a report detailing why so many had tried and failed, and concluded that existing solutions were prohibitively complicated, overly bulky, and too challenging to maintain.
To avoid the same fate, Phanes’ Core Value Proposition explicitly addresses these challenges.
Phane’s entire embedded system was prototyped using Arduino’s open-source hardware and IDE. The MIT App Inventor platform was used to develop a custom Android app that can remotely monitor patient’s vitals over Bluetooth.
