Breathe Easy: The students solving the problem of poor management of respiratory health conditions

The Problem

Pleural, this year’s UK National James Dyson Award winner tackles the problem of the lack of at home treatment and monitoring of those with chronic respiratory conditions struggling to access the appropriate care. Untreated mucus can lead to infections and exacerbations which increase the likelihood of hospitalisation and death. Some patients suffering from these conditions would be offered chest physiotherapy but would have to travel for treatment. Patients with COPD, cystic fibrosis and bronchiectasis can also suffer from anxiety due to limited understanding of the development of their condition, so the team at Pleural developed a solution that could both provide effective treatment and regular condition monitoring at home.

The Invention

Inhale, exhale. Pleural is an autonomous mucus management device for the 3.9 million Brits suffering from debilitating airway mucus. It uses intelligent analysis to provide the most effective treatment and monitoring to patients for relief and reduced infection risk.

The device administers chest physiotherapy according to best clinical practice, which is traditionally done manually by a physiotherapist. Pleural uses a silicone cup to apply a calculated force to the chest at particular frequencies to mobilise mucus from the lungs.

The team at Pleural realised a doctor’s finger-tapping percussion on a patient’s chest during auscultation generates impulse signals, which are intuitively interpreted alongside breathing sounds using a stethoscope to analyse the chest. This takes years of training but advances in machine learning have allowed the team of students at Pleural to train an AI to do most of the hard work. They discovered they could use the same percussive mechanism to provide the input for AI-powered auscultation and for the percussive chest clearance therapy itself, so clearance and analysis happen in tandem. Users can confidently perform airway clearance therapy at home, with the device providing guidance and progress tracking through the companion app to ensure thorough treatment.

The UK National Winners of the James Dyson Award and young inventors of Pleural: Daniel Hale, Will Eliot, Fergus Laidlaw and Yihan Dong (aged between twenty-five and thirty) met while studying a double masters in Innovation Design Engineering at Imperial College and the Royal College of Art in London. The group came to their course from different backgrounds and with different experiences, making it a dynamic grouping.

The winning team hope to get Pleural into the hands of those that need it, to make a real tangible impact on the lives of people living with conditions such as asthma, COPD, cystic fibrosis, and bronchiectasis. They hope to bring the product to market and are keen to help solve other challenges out in the world, both in the respiratory space and beyond. 

Winning the national leg of the James Dyson Award will inject £5,000 into Pleural. This prize money will help Pleural produce a fully functional, technologically integrated prototype. This means creating a device that has in-built smart qualities that can carry out a full treatment process, generate data to be analysed by machine learning, and deliver insights on lung health via the app. 

The Prototypes

The team at Pleural produced over 40 experimental prototypes: more than 10 to explore form factor, and at least 4 technical generations. Daniel, Will, Yihan and Fergus used an experimental process to identify emerging technologies that could potentially solve for key problem areas within respiratory conditions: prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. The team quickly realised that treatment for many people with excess mucus was underserved. Rigs were created to test mucus mobilisation techniques, as well as developing a machine learning methodology to analyse the levels of mucus within the lungs.

The Pleural team also created several iterations of the percussion rigs to deliver a safe but effective physical impact to the chest. The team have worked on the development of Pleural for over a year and as students, have been forced to work in a lean and agile way without spending too much money on materials.

The start of the project was an intense and fast sprint, with many technical milestones being achieved in a short space of time over five months. In this time the team endured many late nights and hours put in to create something that would truly meet the needs of the people that would require this device. The months since then have been focussed on outreach and further customer discovery, bringing Pleural to potential users for further evaluation and insight discovery, as well as seeking advice on getting a better understanding on how Pleural itself might run as a business.

What's next

Pleural will progress to the international stage of the James Dyson Award and the winners Dan, Will, Fergus and Yihan aim to commercialise this product by producing a fully functional, technologically integrated prototype. This means creating a device that has in-built smart qualities that can carry out a full treatment process, generate data to be analysed by machine learning, and deliver insights on lung health via the app to allow the device to be accessed by those that need it.

The international top 20 shortlist will be announced on 18^th October, and the international winners on 15^th November.